
?ff 




iBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap. Copyright No..__ 

sheiL.LBi?;:'; 

.Be 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



EDITED BY 

WILLIAM T. HARRIS, A.M., LL. D. 



Vol ujie XL V 



INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES 



LETTERS TO A MOTHER 



ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF FROEBEL 



BY 

SUSAN E. BLOW 

AUTHOR OF SYMBOLIC EDITATION, MOTTOES AND COMMENTARIISS 
OF FBOEDEL'S MOT1IEI4 PLAY, ETC. 



NEW YORK 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1899 

L. 



LB/)U 
.66 



26714 



Copyright, 1899, 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 



Electrotyped and Printed 

AT THE APPLETON PRESS, U. S. A. 



TWWOCOf^.,,,.,^^.^^^,^ 




KAn9-189i 



>\*V 



X1^\K> 



ri /> 



TO MY SISTER 

LIZZIE CHARLESS 

AND MY NIECE 

ATHENA FEODOROVNA, 

THROUGH WHOSE BRIEF BUT BEAUTIFUL LIVES 
I LEARNED TO REVERE IDEAL CHILDHOOD, 

THIS BOOK 

IS TENDERLY DEDICATED. 

V 



EDITOR'S PREFACE. 



Froebel seizes tlie rudimentary activities in tlio 
cliild's mind and discovers means of exercising them 
so as to educate tliem by development. He makes 
a systematic series of plays and games wliicli point 
proplietically forward to tlie civilization wliicli re- 
veals itself in adult occupations. 

The theory of evolution explains each faculty 
and habit of man by pointing back to some violence 
or danger against which the animal aroused all its 
energies to protect itself. The faculty or habit 
is a survival of that struggle. Modern educational 
theory sometimes borrows evolution to explain men- 
tal activities, and sometimes it supposes that it has 
thrown light upon methods of instruction when it 
has shown an activity to be the heir of a supersti- 
tion which arose through some physical evil in a 
remote epoch — for example, when it has shown 



viii LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

that some religious doctrine is likewise a reminis- 
cence of some ancient fear of Nature or some ordi- 
nance of the patriarchal stage of society. This evo- 
lution theory in education has one great defect — 
namely, that it does not discriminate between that 
class of present activities which are survivals and 
slowly becoming dormant through non-exercise, 
and on the other hand those activities which had 
rude beginnings and imperfectly realized their pur- 
pose, but have been perfecting themselves more and 
more with the progress of human civilization. Ac- 
cording to the former diagnosis the belief in a God 
would be the survival of an ancient superstition, of 
the patriarchal family ordinance, or ancestor wor- 
ship, while according to the latter it would be the 
result of the growth of man's insight into the pur- 
pose of Nature and man and the necessity of presup- 
posing an Absolute Reason to explain the world of 
evolution in which we live. 

To show that something is a survival is to dis- 
credit it. To show that it had a rude beginning, 
but has progressed onward to a divine realization is 
to make it precious. 

Human life points forward as well as backward 
in evolution. There is not only the vanishing pro- 



EDITOR'S PREFACE. ix 

cess which appertains to crude conditions which 
have been outlived, but also a process of develop- 
ment by which " good is educed from evil, and 
good is made better yet in infinite progression." 
This latter view is the guiding insight for educa- 
tion; it looks upon the child as the father of the 
man. Love of life and freedom is not a survival of 
a crude and violent life experience in prehistoric 
times, but it is the primordial instinct that has cre- 
ated the long succession of progressive human con- 
ditions, crowning the whole with a Christian civili- 
zation : 

Striving to be man, the worm 
Mounts through all the spires of form. 

The object of the present book is to explain in 
language addressed to the general public the phi- 
losoj)hy of Froebel. Its author finds it necessary 
for this purpose to take up the most important doc- 
trines one after the other as they were developed in 
the Mutter und Ivose Lieder, and show their equiva- 
lents in the different systems of thought that pre- 
vail. In some cases these systems are in harmony 
with Froebel, and in other cases there is profound 
disagreement. It is well for all students of the kin- 
dergarten to deepen their knowledge of his prin- 



X LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

ciples by seeing their ultimate consequences and 
understanding how they apply to practical ques- 
tions in the instruction of the young. The teacher 
ought to be able to understand things in their causes 
and reasons, and not rely too much upon mere au- 
thority. The importance of this will be readily 
understood by those who have seen in recent years 
the unprofitable experiments made by kindergart- 
ners who have only partially understood Froebel, 
and who have been easily caught by some plausible 
doctrine brought forward as an improvement, but 
which is really at variance with the true theory of 
the kindergarten as well as with that of all sound 
pedagogy. 

The readers of the discussions in this book will 
readily concede that the exposition of the results of 
the theory of the kindergarten, and also the defense 
of its practice as against systems that conflict with 
it, are presented with a clearness and force new in 
the literature of the subject. In this respect as well 
as in many others this book is most timely. 

Froebel's doctrine of the kindergarten stands or 
falls with that theory of symbolism which teaches 
that truth can be presented in other ways than in 
the scientific form. It holds that the first stages 



EDITOR'S PREFACE. xi 

of cognition deal largely with symbols, and that 
only with the increasing power of analysis does the 
mind become able to discriminate differences as well 
as perceive identities. A vague perception of same- 
ness or identity is all that the child can attain to. 
But when the object is brought accurately into the 
focus of the mind the definition grows toward com- 
pleteness. The first stage of the development of 
the soul, therefore, is that in which feeling pre- 
dominates over intellect and will. 

In order to make clear how the earlier stage of 
the mind differs from the later I have often found 
it convenient to illustrate it by explaining the dif- 
ference between mere facts, typical facts, and prin- 
ciples. Each fact depends on other facts. Every- 
thing depends on its environment. If we come to 
investigate what a fact really is, therefore, we see 
extending on all sides of it long series of relations 
and dependencies. A fact taken out of its relations 
would be no fact at all, or at least only an empty 
form of a fact. It is not sufficient to place us before 
the reality and expect that we shall know it ade- 
quately and without effort. That is the mistake of 
those who believe in perception rather than in ap- 
perception. Perception sees only what is externally 



xii LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

presented in the object before it. Apperception not 
only sees tlie object, but explains it by thinking it 
in the light of its past history and in its dependency 
upon distant objects not in the field of perception, 
tliiis re-enforcing the experience of the present mo- 
ment by placing it in relation to all past experience. 
In seizing a fact, everything depends on how 
large a portion of its entire compass is reached. 
The illustration of Isaac Newton and the apple has 
been often used to make this clear. Newton's per- 
ception may have been the same as that of the do- 
mestic animal who ran to devour the apple when 
it fell. But his apperception was altogether differ- 
ent. The animal saw only the practical and useful 
fact that the apple was good to eat and had come 
within his reach. Newton saw in the fall of the 
apple the cause acting as the law of gravity, which 
impelled the apple to the earth and also caused the 
movement of the moon which he noticed in the sky 
as he looked up through the branches of the apple 
tree. The animal had a practical, useful common 
sense, but it did not give him true knowledge. For 
the fact of the fall of the apple was not the whole 
fact. The true fact was much larger than the ani- 
mal saw, for the fact included this great law of 



EDITOR'S PEEFACE. xiii 

gravity and the movements taking place according 
to it in the starry heavens. Without other attract- 
ing bodies than the apple there would have been no 
gravitation to cause any movement of falling. 

A fact as usually observed is only a partial 
truth — it is a little glimpse of the true reality, it 
is a symbolic object of knowledge. Such a fact be- 
comes truth only when it is seen in its scientific 
principle. Then we see the great whole of which 
the fact is only a partial manifestation. The animal 
senses alone do not see the truth, but only a small 
phase of it, as inadequate as the particular grass 
blade under our feet would be if it were offered to 
us as the reality of the whole vegetable world. The 
law of the fact states what is true under all circum- 
stances. 

Midway between facts and principles are typical 
facts. These are what art and poetry use. The 
natural symbolism of the mind uses such facts to 
best advantage. The typical fact is one so complete 
that it illustrates almost all of the phases of the law 
or principle. Each fact gives some phases of the 
law but not all, and is therefore defective. The 
typical fact should contain all phases. 

Art and poetry in giving to facts the form of 



xiv LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

types make for us a series of permanent facts. 
These facts of poetry do not have such historic 
reality as particular events or individuals have, but 
a deeper one, inasmuch as they present for us a 
more correct general impression. Shakespeare's his- 
torical plays give us an accovmt of the development 
and growth of the English nation from a mere de- 
pendency of France and Rome to a mighty nation 
Avitli a national church and a powerful House of 
Commons. No history yet written shows us the 
essentials — the typical facts — like these historical 
plays of Shakespeare. So, too, a novel of Charles 
Kingsley or of Walter Scott, of Felix Dahn or 
Sienkiewicz, may give us the true picture of an 
historic epoch, while the historian's account may be 
far from adequate, through its failure to seize the 
motives of the actors. 

The mythical epoch of a nation's history fur- 
nishes symbols of theoretical and moral truths. 
The Prose Edda in recounting the events of Thor's 
journey to Utgard presents in an interesting way 
the doctrine above discussed of the inadequacy of 
facts merely perceived and not apperceived. 

Thor was told to lift a cat which he saw in the 
corner of the room. As he lifted the animal it 



EDITOR'S PREFACE. XV 

arched its back and lie could not reach high enough 
to raise all the feet clear of the floor. It was later 
explained to him by the giant that this cat was a 
coil of the world serpent which holds the world to- 
gether. At one time Thor had succeeded in lift- 
ing one of the feet from the floor. Had he lifted 
all the feet the world serpent would have lost his 
gri]3 and the world would have gone to pieces. 
Thor was told to drink a beaker of mead, but with 
all his efforts (and Thor was a famous drinker) he 
could not drain the cup. The explanation subse- 
quently made to him was that the beaker which ap- 
l^eared to him as only a small cup was so connected 
with the sea that had he emptied it he would have 
emptied the sea. Every fact is like the world ser- 
pent in that in its entire compass it involves all the 
other facts of the world, and without a connecting 
principle all these facts go to pieces in chaotic con- 
fusion. Every fact is, like the beaker of mead, con- 
nected with a sea of facts, all of which must be com- 
prehended if we truly comprehend the single fact. 

W. T. Haeris. 
Washington, D. C, January 13, 1S99. 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 



The preface to Symbolic Education contains a 
promise of which the present volume is a partial 
fulfillment, although upon further reflection I have 
abandoned my original plan of publication. All 
kindergartners who love and appreciate the Mother- 
Play will realize that it needs more extended com- 
ment than that plan provided for, and will, I hope, 
accept this book as an attempt to show how each 
motto, song, and commentary should be studied. 

As these letters may fall into the hands of some 
readers not familiar with the Mother-Play, it seems 
well to mention that they deal with comparatively 
few of the subjects discussed in that remarkable 
book. They will do most good to those in whom 
they quicken a resolution to master not only the 
Mother-Play, but all the works of Froebel. 

There is an old superstition that no arrow goes 

straight to its mark unless it has been dipped in the 

xvii 



xviii LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

marksman's blood. The study of the Mother-Phaj 
has taught me truths through which, had I known 
them when I most needed them, I might have 
avoided many errors and been spared much sorrow. 
With the hope that my book may help others to 
avoid my own mistakes, I commit it to the generous 
judgment of readers, many of whom are already 
my friends. 

Susan E. Blow. 

Avon, December 27, 1898. 



CONTENTS. 



LETTER v^ , , 

I.— Heart insight Tf*^ 


,tu: 






PAGE 

. 1 


II. — Self-making . . . . 








. 35 


III. — From wind to spirit 








. 67 


IV. — Making by unmaking 








. 91 


V. — Heaven's first law 








. 127 


VI. — The revelation of sense 








. 167 


VII. — The soul op the flower 








. 209 


VIII. — The discovery of life . 








. 243 


IX. — A PROPHECY of freedom 








. 281 



LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 



LETTEE I. 

HEAET INSIGHT. 
FALLING! FALLING! 

MOTTO. 

A game to strengthen the whole body. 
All a mother does or says 

Is inspired by thouglitful love. 
" Falling ! falling ! " she is playing, 
But her hand the fall is staying, 

So her love to prove. 

To her child her life is given, 

Thought, and word, and deed, and prayer ; 
And her hold, an instant broken, 
To his mind is but a token 

Of her constant care. 

Soon her arms must loose their hold, 

Not, as now, in pretty play — 
Keeping still their circle round him. 
That no jar or fright may wound him — 

But for all the day. 

And for this, her thought and love 

Must his little life prepare ; 
Teaching first how she is needed. 
That through her fond cautions heeded 

He may learn self-care. 

Henrietta E. Eliot. 



2 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

SONG. 

Down goes baby, 

Mother's pet; 

Up comes baby, 

Laugbiug yet. 

Baby well may laugh at harm. 

While beneath is mother's arm. 

Down goes baby, 
Without fear ; 
Up comes baby, 
Gayly here. 
All is joy for baby while 
In the light of mother's smile. 

Emilie Poulsson. 

Your letter, dear old friend, is in the impera- 
tive mood. You set my duty so clearly before me 
tliat I dare neither evade nor postpone it. So here 
begins the first of a series of letters upon the 
Mother-Play, Others shall follow as fast as I have 
time and strength to write them. I hope they may 
aid you to bring up my godson in the way he should 
go, and I shall also try to make them helpful to 
your sister Helen in her work with the children in 
her kindergarten. 

As I write, I seem to see you and your dear 
little Harold before me, and recollections of my 
last long visit to you crowd upon my mind. Do 
you remember the morning you made your first ex- 
periment with the Falling Game, and how happy 



HEART INSIGHT. 3 

you were wlien, after a few repetitions of tlie play, 
your boy's look of fear and anxiety clianged to one 
of delight? Do you remember for how many weeks 
the minutes devoted to this game were the live- 
liest of our day; how after a time Master Harold 
found the Falling Play tame, and reserved his crows 
of delight for the Tossing Game, and how, without 
a sign of fear, he would let his papa toss him high 
in the air? Do you remember his advance from 
the Tossing Game to the Jumping Game, and with 
what confidence he sprang from the high mantle 
into your outstretched arms? If these pictures 
stand out in your memory as they do in mine, they 
will interpret the first scene in Froebel's drama of 
infancy far better than it can be interpreted by 
any words. Indeed, all that Froebel ever asks of 
mothers is to watch their own instinctive play, and 
define to themselves its latent motives.* 

Ask yourself, therefore, what impulse incited 
you to play the Falling Game. "Was it not a long- 

* The reader must not nnrlerstand that I am recommencl- 
ing mothers to play the Jumping and Tossing games, both of 
which are dangerous for bal)ies. I refer to them in order to 
show that maternal instinct has always played upon the 
strings which Froebel touches in the Falling Game. He has 
selected the one play of this type which is free from danger. 



4 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

ing to speed the moment wlien Harold should look 
into your face with recognizing eyes, when faith 
should spring up in his heart to meet the love in 
yours, and when the physical union between you 
and your baby should be transfigured into a union 
of hearts? Answer these questions, and then read 
in Froebel's song the lines: 

" Baby well may laugh at harm 
While beneath is mother's arm," 

and you will hold in your thought the key to the 
Falling Game. Some of the many doors this key 
unlocks I shall try to show you in this letter. 

It has interested me to observe that, diifering 
in this respect from every other game in the book, 
Falling-Falling implies no manifestation of the 
child as its point of departure, but springs unso- 
licited from the mother's heart. Love working 
from above downward is the condition of faith 
striving from below upward, and Froebel is hint- 
ing at rich depths of thought and experience 
when he begins his book with the picture of ma- 
ternal devotion outrunning all appeal and seeking 
to call forth an answer to itself. 

Understood as a typical experience, the lesson of 



HEART INSIGHT. 5 

the Falling Game is that the nurture of childhood 
must be rooted and grounded in faith. If this truth 
seem to you so self-evident that you doubt the ne- 
cessity of stating it, look within and around you, 
and you will find that every day and every hour 
force upon you instances of its violation. Do you 
know no parents who attempt to guide their chil- 
dren by explaining and justifying their own com- 
mands? Do you not know others who rule by mere 
brute force? Can you deny that you are yourself 
constantly betrayed into adopting one or the other 
of these false and futile methods? Are you clearly 
conscious that the method of force means to its vic- 
tims a life oscillating between slavery and anarchy, 
while the method of explanation fosters irreverence 
and conceit, and is practically an appeal to the igno- 
rant and inexperienced child to sit in judgment 
upon the actions of his parents? 

According to Rousseau, the method of appeal 
to childish reason was the one upheld by Locke. 
It may be questioned whether in this matter he did 
justice to the English reformer, but his strictures 
upon the method itself are admirable. " Mr. 
Locke's maxim," he writes, " was to educate chil- 
dren by reasoning with them, and it is that which 



6 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

is now most in vogue. The success of it, however, 
doth not appear to recommend it, and, for my own 
part, I meet with no children so silly and ridiculous 
as those with whom much argument hath been held. 
Of all the faculties of man, that of reason, vrhich is, 
in fact, only a compound of all the rest, unfolds it- 
self the latest, and with the greatest difficulty; and 
yet this is what we would make use of to develop 
the first and easiest of them. The great end of a 
good education is to form a reasonable man, and 
we pretend to educate a child by the means of 
reason! This is beginning where we should leave 
off, and making an im^^lement of the work we are 
about." 

The antithesis to government by argument and 
explanation is government by force, and, as I have 
said, parents who avoid the former error are often 
betrayed into the latter. In like manner Rousseau, 
reacting against Locke, announces as the first prin- 
ciple of control that the child " be made sensible 
that he is weak and you are strong, and that from 
your situation and his he lies necessarily at your 
mercy. Let him know this fact, and early feel on 
his aspiring crest the hard yoke Nature hath im- 
posed on man. By this method you will render his 



HEART INSIGHT. 7 

disposition patient, equable, resigned, and peace- 
able." 

From the ninety degraded children wbom lie 
mothered at Stanz the gentle Pestalozzi learned that 
not in force and not in appeals to reason, but in 
quickening faith must be sought the point of con- 
tact between the nurturing and the nurtured 
life. His experience is a classic one in the history 
of educational reform, and from its theoretical 
outcome, as given in his most important book, How 
Gertrude Teaches her Children, I have often 
thought Froebel may have received the impulse 
which flowered into the Mother-Play. But be this 
as it may, the Falling Game condenses into one re- 
vealing example the whole range of experience de- 
scribed by Pestalozzi, and defining to the mother 
her own elemental impulse enables her to discover 
consciously the true point of departure for the nur- 
ture of childhood. 

Faith presupposes experience. Baby is fright- 
ened when he begins to play the Falling <jame; he 
learns to trust the mother's arm because he finds it 
strong. In like manner he must learn to trust her 
wisdom and her love. He can not believe in them 
if they do not exist; he can only half believe them 



8 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

if tliej are inconsistent and vacillating. Hence 
Froebel's insistence upon tlie need of a mother's be- 
ing all slie would have her children believe her to 
be, and the solemn warnings which he introduces 
into his commentaries on Beckoning the Pigeons, 
and the Knights and the Bad Child. We fail to 
inspire faith because we fail to deserve it, and a 
regenerate motherhood is the one indispensable con- 
dition of a regenerate childhood. 

If you can win and hold Harold's faith, you will 
find that you have practically solved the problem 
of nurture. For if he trusts you he will obey you; 
he will hide nothing from you; he will not resent 
your punishments, and when he asks you questions 
whose true answers are beyond his comprehension 
he will humbly accej)t your simple statement that 
they can not be explained to him until he is older. 
The conversation between mother and child in 
Froebel's commentary on the Weathervane is con- 
ceived in this spirit, and presupposes a firmly teth- 
ered cord of faith. 

While the Falling Song accentuates trust in the 
mother, the motto and commentary expressly state 
that the object of the game is the nurture and devel- 
opment of force. Is there then a contradiction be- 



HEART INSIGHT. 9 

tween the song and tlie commentary, and if not, 
what is the tie which binds together the seemingly 
contradictory statements? Look again into your 
own heart, and observe if it be not always faith 
which inspires the effort through which strength is 
won. If the answer is not conclusive, seek the ver- 
dict of that larger experience of which your own 
is but a fragment. Recall those heart-inspired 
words, " Frederick, is God dead? " with which old 
Sojourner Truth revived the dying courage of Fred 
Douglass. Remind yourself of the noblest motto 
which has sprung from our national system of uni- 
versal suffrage: " One with God is a majority." 
Send your imagination backward through the cen- 
turies and call forth the image of the great de- 
fender of Christian truth defying triumphant 
heresy with the words " Athanasius against the 
world ! " Remember how hordes of faithless Chris- 
tians fled before Saracen armies inspired by the 
words of the Koran : " O true believers, if ye assist 
God in fighting for his religion he will assist you 
against your enemies." Picture Luther summoned 
to the Diet of Worms, warned by anxious friends 
to disobey the summons, declaring stoutly, " Were 
there as many devils in Worms as there are roof 



10 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

tiles I would on," and revealing tlie secret of his 
courage in liis paraphrase of the 46th Psalm. 
Listen to the Huguenots singing as they march into 
battle, " The truth of the Lord endureth forever," 
and hear the same words shouted by Cromwell and 
his soldiers at Dunbar. Ask yourself why the an- 
cient Israelites and the English Puritans are the 
most resolute and unyielding personalities known 
to history, and read the answer written in their 
every word and deed that it was because they be- 
lieved themselves to be fighting with and for the 
eternal and unconquerable Power " which makes 
for righteousness." The secretof strength is always 
the same, and the very words of our Falling Song, 

" Baby well may laugh at harm 
While beneath is mother's arm," 

are but one feeble echo of the faith which has 
nerved the heroes of all ages : " The eternal God 
is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting 
arms." 

Proebel had insight into the " fine secret that 
little explains large and large little." Hence he 
discerned how the child out of weakness is made 
strong. The Falling, Jumping, Tossing Games 



HEART INSIGHT. H 

are baby's first acts of faitli. Waxing faitb nerves 
him to totter toward his mother's outstretched arms. 
Later it is again faith which inspires him to attempt 
the task she believes he can do, and attack the prob- 
lem she believes he can solve. Trusting her trust 
in him he puts forth all his strength, and through 
faith-inspired effort wins strength and self-reliance. 
It is one of the happy paradoxes of spirit that 
without dependence there can be no independence, 
and that precisely in proportion to our faith will 
be our intellectual and moral activity. All indi- 
vidual relationships and all corporate life rest upon 
pillars of faith. Children must trust parents, the 
husband must trust his wife, friend must trust 
friend, we must all trust the tradesman with whom 
we deal, the corporations and officials upon whose 
care depends our safety in travel, the physician to 
whose integrity, skill, and devotion we appeal in 
illness, the lawyer to whom we submit vexed ques- 
tions of justice; the economic system upon which 
depends the fair participation of each man in the 
labor of all men; the government which orders and 
protects other institutions; the church, which dis- 
cerns, declares, and develops in individual con- 
sciousness the ideals which have created our special 
3 



12 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

type of family life, our forms of civil society, and 
our republican state. 

You need only recall our studies of Dante to re- 
vive your realizing sense of tlie truth, tliat faith is 
the beating heart of the body corporate. What a 
revelation it was to us when we understood why the 
circles of fraud were placed lower in the Inferno 
than the circles of violence ! Were robbery, tyran- 
ny, murder, suicide really less heinous offences than 
flattery, hypocrisy, thieving, simony, and political 
prostitution? Was fraud so hateful to God because 
it "dissevers the bond of love which JSTature makes," 
and striking at combination breaks the tie that 
unites the world? Was treachery the blackest of 
sins because it not only loosed the tie of universal 
brotherhood, but sundered the closer and more 
spiritual cords woven by free choices of the will? 
Was all sin in essence the attack of will upon will, 
and was violence a sin of less degree than fraud be- 
cause its attack was merely external? Was fraud 
the slaughter of will by will, the murder of spirit 
by spirit? Conversely, if faith were the living cord 
which bound all individuals into one great human- 
ity, and made possible the hierarchy of human insti- 
tutions, was not the nurture of faith the beginning 



HEART INSIGHT. 13 

of all true education, and was it not tlie prime duty 
of tlie educator to win faith by deserving it? .^.^a 

You will remember bow with whole hearts we 
learned to affirm these truths as we studied the great 
poet who has painted every deed of man in the 
perspective of its consequences, but I think you 
will agree with me that we did not in those old days 
fully realize that faith in fellowmen is as necessary 
to our intellectual as it is to our ethical life. How 
very few of the myriad objects in the world does 
any one individual have the opportunity to per- 
ceive! How misleading must be his perceptions 
even of these numerically insignificant objects un- 
less by comparing his own results with those of 
others he learns to subtract the errors and exaggera- 
tions he has unwittingly contributed, A child's un- 
guided examination of the simplest object will al- 
most invariably center about non-essential quali- 
ties, and leading him to search for essential qualities 
simply means that you are helping him to correct 
his own perceptions, by the perceptions and re- 
flections of others. We depend upon reports of 
our fellowmen for by far the greater part of our 
knowledge of sensible objects, and it is also through 
our fellows that we learn to perceive aright even 



14 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

the few with which we come into immediate con- 
tact. Unless we believed their reports we should 
not try to verify them. So rising to higher planes 
of mental activity it is because we believe that men 
are able to draw from experience valid inferences, 
and to discover beneath experience valid presup- 
positions, that we exert our powers of understand- 
ing and strive to recreate their insights. In their 
light we see light, and through seeing our intel- 
lectual eye grows strong. Evidently, therefore, 
faith is both the condition of mental enlargement 
and the source of mental activity.* 

The dialectic of faith forces us to higher planes 
of thought, and I want you now to consider that 
the active pursuit of knowledge has a root deeper 
even than trust in fellowmen. Have you ever won- 
dered why Asia has no science? or connected this 
defect with the fact that to the Oriental mind Na- 
ture is Maia or illusion — a phenomenon without a 
noumenon, a manifestation without any essence 
which it manifests? The apparent universe is only 
an evil dream. Why, then, give oneself the 
trouble to learn anything about it. Rather let the 

* Psychologic Foundations of Education, by W. T. Harris, 
Int. Edu. Series, pp. 74, 75. 



HEART INSTGHT. 15 

devout mind waken from its nightmare and leam 
the restful truths that Brahma is nothingness and 
JSTirvana extinction. 

We owe to Professor Huxley a candid admis- 
sion of the fact that all science presupposes belief 
in the reality and intelligibility of Nature. In his 
view, " the one act of faith in the convert to science 
is confession of the universality of order, and the 
absolute validity in all times and under all circum- 
stances of the law of causation." Differently 
stated, we search for law and order in ISTature be- 
cause we believe they will be found there, and to 
believe that law and order exist in ^N^ature is im- 
plicitly to affirm that Kature is the product of an 
ordering intelligence. Sir John Herschel once said, 
" It is but reasonable to regard the force of gravita- 
tion as the direct or indirect result of a conscious- 
ness or will existing somewhere." His remark ap- 
plies not only to all forces, but to all laws which 
are really only the forms under which forces 
act, and unless we are ready to admit that science 
is merely a " lucid madness occupied in tabulating 
its own necessary hallucinations," we must recog- 
nize in the outer world the expression of an outer 
mind. All poetry, art, and philosophy imply the 



16 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

same triifli, and it was because Greece attained first 
to the faith and later to the insight that there is 
a personal core to the universe, that she became the 
fountain head of these highest forms of spiritual 
activity. 

I have said nothing about faith as the prompt- 
ing motive of religion, both because in this sphere 
its paramount importance is generally admitted, 
and because I believe that by recognizing its power 
in other domains of life we shall the more readily 
understand why without faith it is impossible to 
please God. Is there a keener stab than distrust, 
and if we w^ho merit only partial faith are so hurt 
by doubt what must lie feel who alone is worthy of 
absolute confidence ? God has been called " the 
great Misunderstood," and we begin to comprehend 
His eternal cross and jiassion when we reflect that 
every doubt is a mortal thrust at the heart of love. 

I said in the beginning of this letter that faith 
presupposes experience. I must now add that it is a 
generous venture of the soul beyond experience. 
It is the divination of a secret of which all ex- 
perience is but a partial disclosure. It is the active 
instinct of sonship and brotherhood. It is heart 
insight, an impulsive leap of the individual toward 



HEART INSIGHT. 17 

the universal spirit, and by its very nature it points 
toward the perfect communion of man with man 
and of humanity with God. It is the afferent and 
efferent nerve of the soul — the electric line over 
which spiritual life is both communicated and dis- 
charged. Waxing faith means a heightened recep- 
tivity to inflowing divinity — waning faith means 
the rupture of the individual from his own abysmal 
self, and hence the shrinkage of his powers and the 
shriveling of his life. 

Do you see whither my letter is tending? If 
faith is the miracle by which the soul invades the 
realm of miracles, if it is the core of love and 
friendship, if it incites activity, develops force, 
and creates heroes, if it originates and sustains in- 
stitutions and is the antecedent condition of litera- 
ture, science, art, and religion, if, finally, it seeks 
and justifies its own presuppositions in philosophy, 
then may it not be because the little child possesses 
in larger measure than the man that ardor of trust 
which overleaps the strict bounds of evidence 
that we are enjoined to learn from him how to enter 
the kingdom of heaven, and conversely, must not 
the terminus ah quo of child nurture be sought in 
that primordial impulse of motherhood which seelcG 



18 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

to awaken faith? It seems to me Pestalozzi and 
Froebel have given no higher proof of their wisdom 
than in their recognition of this impulse as the 
jwint of departure ■ for education, and if you will 
bear with a very long letter I should like to give you 
Pestalozzi's insight in his own touching words: 

*' I am unwilling to bring these letters to an end 
without touching on what I may call the keystone 
of my whole system. Is the love of God encour- 
aged by these principles, which I hold to be the 
only sound basis for the development of humanity? 

" Once again I look into my own heart for an 
answer to my question, and ask myself: 'How 
does the idea of God take root in my soul ? Whence 
comes it that I believe in God, that I abandon my- 
self to Him, and feel happy when I love Him and 
trust Him, thank Him and obey Him? ' 

" Then I soon see that the sentiments of love, 
trust, gratitude, and obedience must first exist in 
my heart before I can feel them for God. I must 
love men, trust them, thank them, and obey them, 
before I can rise to loving, thanking, trusting, and 
obeying God. ' For he who loveth not his brother 
whom he hath seen, how shall he love his Father in 
heaven, whom he hath not seen? ' 



HEART INSIGHT. 19 

" I next ask myself, ' How is it that I come to 
love men, to trust them, to thank them, and obey 
them? How do these sentiments take root in my 
heart ? ' And I find that it is principally through 
the relations which exist between a mother and her 
infant child. 

" The mother must care for her child, feed it, 
protect it, amuse it. She can not do otherwise; 
her strongest instincts impel her to this course. 
And so she j)rovides for its needs, and in every pos- 
sible way makes up for its powerlessness. Thus the 
child is cared for and made happy, and the first seed 
of love is sown within him. 

" Presently the child's eyes fall on something 
he has never yet seen; seized with wonder and fear, 
he utters a cry; his mother presses him to her 
bosom, plays with him, diverts his attention, and 
his tears cease, though his eyes long remain wet. 
Should the unfamiliar object be seen again, the 
mother shelters the child in her arms, and smiles 
at him as before. This time, instead of crying, he 
answers his mother's smile by smiling himself, and 
the first seed of trust is sown. 

" His mother runs to his cradle at his least sign ; 
if he is hungry, she is there ; if thirsty, she satisfies 



20 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

him; when he hears her step, he is content; when 
he sees her, he stretches out his hand and fastens 
his ejes upon her bosom; to him his mother and 
the satisfaction of his hunger are one and the same 
thing; he is grateful. 

" These germs of love, trust, and gratitude soon 
develop. The child knows his mother's step; he 
smiles at her shadow; he loves whatever is like 
her; a creature of the same appearance as his 
mother is, in his eyes, a good creature. Those 
whom his mother loves, he loves; those whom she 
kisses, he kisses. This smile at the likeness of his 
mother is a smile at humanity, and the seed of 
brotherly love, the love of his fellowmen, is sown. 

" Such are the first elements of moral develop- 
ment awakened by a mother's relations with her 
infant. They are also the elements of religious de- 
velopment, and it is by faith in its mother that the 
child rises to faith in God." 

Credo ut inteUigam, wrote St. Anselm, and his 
confession not only suggests the process by which 
religious truth is apprehended, but has a range of 
meaning coextensive with our entire spiritual activ- 
ity. Again applying the fine secret that little ex- 



HEART INSIGHT. 21 

plains large and large little, we realize tliat out of 
tlie child's faith in his mother must spring aspira- 
tion for companionship with her, while on her side 
the yearning for her baby's trust deepens into 
yearning for her child's comprehension. You 
know that you can not be content with a blind 
obedience even though it be a loving obedience. 
As the physical union between you and Harold has 
been transfigured into emotional union, so you de- 
mand that this unity of feeling shall deepen into 
unity of thought, and heart insight ripen into the 
insight of intellect. Your earlier effort was di- 
rected toward making your baby physically self- 
reliant in order that you might win the higher de- 
pendence of faith; now your effort must be directed 
toward making your boy intellectually and morally 
self-reliant in order that you may realize in him 
that highest dependence of comprehending sym- 
pathy which is the goal of spiritual intercourse. 

That Froebel has well understood you he proves 
by showing you, in the concluding paragraph of his 
Commentary, how you may aid your boy to become 
master of himself. Xotice with what precision he 
attacks the defects which must be overcome before 
the child can be safelv committed to his own care. 



23 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

Tlie skater tumbles because lie is heedless; tlie 
child falls from his sledge because his eye is not 
sure, his hand not strong; the boy and girl drop 
goblet and plate because they are overanxious. In 
inattention, untrained powers, and anxiety mated 
with weakness, lie the sources of inability to rule 
oneself. The tie between these several defects is 
obvious. Strength implies training, training im- 
plies attention, and whoso lacks strength must 
alternate between presumption and over-anxiety. 
Xot only for the children, but for ourselves there 
is a mine of wisdom in these suggestions. AVhy are 
so many mothers and so many kindergartners 
wavering and inconsistent in conduct? Is it not 
because they are doubtful what they ought to do? 
Why are they thus doubtful? Because they lack 
insight? Why do they lack insight? Evidently 
because they have undertaken the most solemn and 
responsible duties with insufficient preparation. 

One word more. Harold can not develop with- 
out trust in you, but neither can he develop as he 
ought unless you trust him. I do not mean that 
you should ignore his faults or exaggerate his 
merits, for this would only destroy his confidence 
in vou. But I do mean that vou should be alert to 



HEART INSIGHT. 23 

recognize the utmost limit of liis power and attain- 
ment, tliat you should let no cowardly fear deter 
you from granting him freedom to do and dare, 
and when you are forced to reprove and pun- 
ish him you should never fail to appeal from his 
actual to his ideal self. " Could there be," asks 
Thoreau, " an accident so sad as to be respected for 
something better than we are ? " As applied to the 
actual self this question admits of only one answer, 
but it needs the supplementary question, " Could 
there be a greater incentive to effort than the gen- 
erous faith which expects of us to become better 
than we are? " This kind of trust the heavenly 
Father has in all his erring children; this kind of 
trust you must never fail to feel in your boy. 

When we understand that faith is the thrill of 
fellowship we are ready to pass from the aim of 
Froebel's first play to its method, and to observe by 
what process the mother wakens the slumbering 
feeling of trust. Remember we are studying a 
Falling Game. ^Notice in Froebel's Commentary 
the twice repeated statement that the child shall 
fall with sufficient force to experience a slight 
shock. He must feel his fall and have some vague 
instinct that he is slipping away from his mother's 



24 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

care. Out of tlie fear born of this sense of with- 
drawn protection rises liis joj in the assurance that 
a loving j)ower watches over his fall and makes it 
safe. 

Life is a series of falls, and if it be regenerate life 
a series of rises out of falls. First come the physical 
tumbles which must be suffered by each child as he 
learns to walk, run, climb, swim. Next in order 
are emotional falls into anger, greediness, and other 
sins of childish incontinence. With youth begin the 
intellectual falls into doubt of inherited creeds and 
defiance of traditional customs. Last of all come the 
dangerous falls of will, consciously and deliberately 
denying in act the truths accepted by thought. Be- 
neath each height of attainment yawns a deeper and 
blacker chasm. Upon each loftier summit man is 
exposed to the danger of a more fatal fall. 

" The true glory of life," writes Goldsmith, 
" consists not in never falling, but in rising every 
time we fall." " Jump up," you say to Harold when 
he has had a tumble, and laughingly kissing the 
spot that hurts, you divert him from the impulse to 
cry. When excessive excitement has betrayed him 
into bad temper, you help the little victim who is 
not able to help himself by attracting his attention 



HEART INSIGHT. 25 

to some object — a flower, a star, a flying bird. 
When jour boj reaches the age of arrogant self- 
assertion you will, if you are wise, be patient and 
forbear to meet challenge with authority. " Who 
never doubted never half believed," and just be- 
cause man is born to be self-limiting he must break 
down all made limits. By interpreting to Harold 
in childhood the falls of weakness, incontinence, and 
inattention, and in youth the falls born of presump- 
tion and of doubt, you will have done what lay in 
your power to save him from the fin^l and fatal 
fall of those who refuse obedience to acknowledged 
obligation. And if at last (which God forbid) there 
come to you that bitterest of mortal pangs — the 
pang of knowing that one you have borne and nur- 
tured is deliberately false to the truth he can not 
deny — then in your own need recall the words with 
which you reassured your falling baby, and sit 
still in the inmost stronghold of the soul — the 
stronghold of confidence in that Infinite Power and 
Love which 

' ' Forges through swart arms of offence 
The silver seat of innocence. " 

To fall and to rise from his fall, such is in brief 
the history of man, and, since man must learn to 



26 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

know liimself, such is the ever-recurrent theme of 
literature. What is the one story repeated in myri- 
ad forms in those mythic tales which are the first 
fruits of man's literary activity? Is it not the story 
of a princess carried off by a dragon, imprisoned, 
disfigured, despairing, but rescued at last by the 
all-conquering hero ? AYhat is the Iliad but the fall 
and rise of Achilles? "What is the Odyssey but the 
fall and rise of Ulysses? What creates the Inferno 
and Purgatorio but the fall of Lucifer? Who fill 
the pit but sinners that have made all kinds of falls? 
Who climb the mountain but sinners rising out of 
all kinds of falls? What is portrayed in the dramas 
of xEschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, but the cir- 
cular sweep of the deed ? What is the new word of 
the last world-poet in his Faust? Is it not once 
again the fall and the rise, the deepest of all falls, 
that of the conscious spirit from itself, the closest of 
all reunions, the reunion of spirit with itself? " I 
know," says thought-weary Faust in bitterness of 
soul, " I know that nothing can be known." What, 
then, is left but the pact with Mephistopheles ? But 
denial must in the end deny itself, and a pact with 
the denying spirit can end only in its own undoing. 
Hence the last world-j)oem must perforce repeat the 



HEART INSIGHT. 27 

one great cycle of human experience, and urged 
by his genius its author has portrayed the cycle 
both in its earliest and its latest form. In the story 
of Margaret he draws with firm but tender hand 
the circle which sweeps from innocence, through 
sin and repentance, to holiness. In the career of 
Faust he paints with words that flame and burn 
the cycle of doubt, denial, aspiration, insight. 

Shall we try to understand why men forever re- 
peat the fact and the story of fall and rise? Shall 
we ask what power generates the spiritual curve, 
ahvays sweeping away from, always returning to 
itself? We hold in ourselves the clew to the mys- 
tery, and we shall find hereafter that it is the clew 
not only to this mystery but to all mysteries. The 
mark of man is reason; the mark of reason is self- 
consciousness; the nature of self -consciousness is to 
be subject-object, or, in other words, the subject 
knowing is the object known; the eternal history of 
consciousness is the oscillation from subject to ob- 
ject, and from object back to subject. " This," says 
Hegel, " is the soul of the world, the universal 
blood," which " pulsates within itself without mov- 
ing itself, and which vibrates within itself without 

ruffling its repose." Source of all conflicts, it is 
4 



28 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

forever at peace; author of all discords, it is the 
master musician by whom alone all discords are re- 
solved. 

Do you remember the description of infancy in 
Tennyson's In Memoriam? 

The baby new to earth and sky, 
What time his tender palm is prest 
Against the circle of the breast, 

Has never thought that "This is I." 

But as he grows he gathers much. 
And learns the use of "I," and " me," 
And finds " I am not what I see, 

And other than the things I touch." 

So rounds he to a separate mind 
From whence clear memory may begin, 
As thro' the frame that binds him in 

His isolation grows defined. 

I have quoted these stanzas because they por- 
tray beautifully that incipient phase of life whicli 
Troebel calls the slumber period. It is the slum- 
ber of spirit because as yet the child lacks self-con- 
sciousness. He is one with all things because he has 
not learned to distinguish himself from them. As 
all physical life begins with a germ alike in tex- 
ture and in chemical composition, so spiritual life 
begins in an unconscious unity with self and the 
world. Physical growth is a process of continuous 



HEART INSIGHT. 29 

differentiation and integration; spiritual life is a 
process of self-diremption and the re-integration 
of these self-produced differences into the unity 
of consciousness. In other words, the movement of 
spiritual life is from a unity which excludes dis- 
tinctions to a unity which includes and harmonizes 
all distinctions. Between these extremes is the 
storm and stress of life when distinctions are per- 
ceived but not harmonized, and when the self 
whose ideal nature is to be a unity in manifoldness 
wages with itself perpetual war. Within the heart 
are colliding impulses, within the intellect collid- 
ing ideas, within the will colliding aims and mo- 
tives. Prototype of heroes, this self knows no peace 
not won by fighting, neither may it ever lay down 
its arms, for each new victory is but the prelude to 
a more strenuous conflict. Scientists tell us of a 
struggle for life and a survival of the fittest. Ver- 
ily [Nature is but the visible spectacle of the soul, 
and the keen and never-ending battle of life a 
masquerade of the eternal conflict of spirit. 

As man reveals and beholds himself in litera- 
ture and art, the child reveals and beholds himself 
in play. Strange, therefore, would it be, if in in- 
fantile games we should not find the short and 



30 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

feeble oscillations of that pendulum of conscious- 
ness whicli sweeps at last beyond the infinite reaches 
of space and time. If our insight be a true one, 
children should play the fall and rise, the estrange- 
ment and return, nor should mother love fail to 
outrun the children and begin the revelation of the 
great human experience with the beginning of life. 
Conversely, if mothers and children fulfill this an- 
ticipation we should accept the fact as a fresh con- 
firmation of our thesis. Therefore once again 
search your own experience, and see if the Falling 
Game be not the first of a series of plays which 
sweep through infinitesimal circles of separation and 
reunion.* Eemembcr how the baby loves to hide 

* The followingr note from Miss Blanche Boardman suggests 
that in the thought underlying the Falling Game, we may find 
the explanation of a curious tendency often observed in chil- 
dren to inflict pain on some especially loved person or object : 

" Of all the many children in little Mary S.'s family ' An- 
nie Rooney,' a most dilapidated specimen of rag doll, is the 
most beloved. 

"The others, more respectable and dainty, are enjoyed as 
dolls, but upon Annie the little three-year-old mother pours 
out a wealth of love. 

" However, after a few moments of fondling and protesta- 
tions of * mother's love,' the doll is often thrown violently on 
the floor, and apparently only to furnish an opportunity for 
renewed expressions and more earnest devotion on the child's 
part, as she takes the fallen baby in her arms again. 



HEART INSIGHT. 31 

and to hear liis motlier wonder over and lament liis 
absence, how, when somewhat older, he delights in 
the Cuckoo Game, which through the voice unites 
the hiding child with the seeking mother, and how 

" A family friend who is much interested in ' child-study' 
has repeatedly watched this play and questioned its meaning. 

" For a student of the Mother-Play has it not a connection 
with the instinctive play of the mother, whieli gave rise to the 
Falling Game '? " 

I know a little boy, between two and three years of age, 
who treats his favorite doll precisely as Annie Rooney was 
treated by her child-mother. When I myself was a little girl, 
I used to enjoy keenly plays in which a younger child, to 
whom I was greatly attracted, was subjected to all kinds of ill 
treatment, and in which my role was that of deliverer and 
comforter. Even then I wondered why these plays gave me 
pleasure, but not until long afterward did I understand that I 
was enjoying l^otli my own quickened sense of sympathy and 
protection and the faith with which the little sufferer turned 
to me as her deliverer. As I grew older I ceased inflicting 
pain or permitting its infliction for the sake of the pleasure 
felt in relieving it, but I was continually imagining those I 
loved as attacked by all kinds of dangers and sorrows, and 
myself as saving them from the former and comforting them 
in the latter. I refer to these experiences because they illus- 
trate one of the many perversions of an impulse which in its 
normal exercise is essential to our life as social beings. Do 
they not also in a measure explain why healthy happy chil- 
dren love to read, and sometimes to write, those morbid sto- 
ries in which the youthful hero or heroine is conducted through 
illness, orphanage, and cruel treatment to final joy ? When 
we have learned to make a wise appeal to the feelings which 
such stories arouse, we shall have done nnich to solve the 
problem of good literature for children. 



32 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

countless are tlie traditional games from whose re- 
current theme of a beleaguered castle and a stolen 
bride Froebel caught the idea which he transfigured 
in The Knights and The Mother. Remember 
how anxiously Harold grasped his ear when you 
tugged at it and then professed to show it to him 
between your fingers; how his eye followed the 
ball which you playfully jerked by its string from 
his hand ; how eagerly he hunted for a hidden but- 
ton; how tirelessly he took apart and put together 
the blocks you had shown him how to build into a 
cube. Then ponder your memories, and you will 
soon begin to realize that these infantile games are 
cast in the one mold of all spiritual activity. What, 
indeed, is self-consciousness but the play of the 
spirit with itself — the deliberate scattering of the 
wealth of thought for the purpose of rewinning it — 
the voluntary self-exile through which the soul 
makes itself everywhere at home. 

Speech, says George Eliot, is but broken light 
upon the depths of the unspoken. My aim in this 
letter has been to quicken in your mind a thought 
which must be created anew by each new thinker. 
We can not paint physical motion either with pig- 
ments or with words, much less dare we hope to 



HEART INSIGHT. 33 

paint tlie ceaseless motion of spirit. You must feel 
it, will it, know it in yourself. Then, and not till 
then, can you really understand why both the 
drama of history and the drama of infancy begin 
with the fall. 






(Strantpftlbcin. 

„ 5Bcnn Jliitfcdjcit jur Ciifl SStrm' 

unb SBcirte tcreegt, 
3n bcr SDhittcr tie ©picllufl mit 

tern iXinH ftd) rcjt. 
33cm ©dicpfcr ifl il)r iki jur 

2Bctfung gcjetcn : 
®d)on friilj im ilinbe 
©cttanbt, gctiitbe 
2)urd) Stu6're« ju fflcflen fcin 

initerc* Cct'en ; 
Duid) ©d)crje unb €)5le(e unb 

ftrtntge* "Sledcn 
©eful le, Gmviintuna unb Slfenctt 

»u mcdiit ' 



e%*^ 







F.% 






Mi- 



-^ 






LETTER 11. 

SELF-MAKIIS"G. 
PLAY WITH THE LIMBS. 

MOTTO. 

Wiitch a mother's answering play, 

When her happy haby kicks ! 
She will brace her hands to please bim, 
Or in loving sort she'll tease him 

With her playful tricks. 

This is not mere fond caprice — 

God inspires the pretty strife ; 
She is leading a beginner 
Through the outer to the inner 

Of his groping life. 

Henrietta E. Eliot. 

SONG. 

Up and down, and in and out. 
Toss the little limbs about ; 
Kick the pretty dimpled feet— 
That's the way to grow, my sweet ! 

This way and that. 

With a pat-a-pat-pat, 

With one, two, three, 

For each little knee. 

By-and-by, in work and play. 
They'll be busy all the day ; 
Wading in the water clear, 
Eunning swift for mother dear. 

35 



36 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

So this way and that, 
With a pat-a-pat-pat, 
And one, two, three. 
For each little knee. 

Emily Huntington Milleb. 

Deak : Have you ever wondered at the 

helplessness of babies as contrasted with the pre- 
cocious independence of young animals? Have you 
ever asked why baby chickens can see, hear, run, 
scratch, scrape, and peck, and why, on the contrary, 
the human infant is born practically blind and deaf, 
is unable to balance his own head, and can neither 
grasp, hold, walk, stand, creep, nor sit? Knowing 
you, I am sure you have not only asked these ques- 
tions, but have read carefully the answers given to 
them by Mr. Fiske in his many and lucid explana- 
tions of the meaning of infancy. You have learned 
from him the connection between the helplessness 
of babyhood and man's capacity for progress. You 
know that the mental life of animals is restricted to 
a few simple acts which, being repeated through- 
out the careers of individuals and of species, come 
to be performed easily and unconsciously. You un- 
derstand that because animals do very few things 
and do them often the nervous connections neces- 
sary for their performance are perfected and trans- 



SELF-MAKING. 37 

mitted, aud tliat consequently tlirougliout tlie ani- 
mal world heredity is dominant and education im- 
possible. Finally, you know that the intellectual 
chasm which separates the lowest man from the 
highest animal is marked physically by increase of 
cerebral surface and by prolongation of the period 
of infancy, or, in other words, that increasing intel- 
ligence, increasing brain surface, and a lengthening 
infancy always go hand in hand. The reciprocal 
relation of these facts is obvious. With increase 
of cerebral surface comes increase in the amount of 
cerebral organization to be completed after birth, 
and hence an extension of the period of infancy. 
The extension of infancy in turn brings about 
increased versatility and plasticity, and produces a 
further enlargement of the cerebral area. Hence 
the lengthened and still lengthening period of 
human adolescence is the guaranty of a boundless 
ca]3acity for progress. 

Another and not less important outcome of a 
long and feeble infancy is the birth of the moral 
sentiments. The helplessness of childhood calls 
forth in father and mother protective and self- 
denying impulses, while conversely the love and 
care of parents wakens in the heart of the child 



38 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

responsive feelings of dependence and affection. 
Out of the rudimentary sympathies of infancy are 
developed later the sense of obligation and the idea 
of duty. The significance of this genetic evolution 
becomes apparent when we reflect that the ascent of 
humanity from the savage to the civilized state is 
marked on the one hand by increasing complexity 
of social organization, and on the other by a pro- 
gressive extension of the sense of moral obligation 
until it finally includes the whole brotherhood of 
man. 

The accounts of children who have become im- 
bruted by growing up among animals and apart 
from human beings illustrate the fact that the iso- 
lated individual does not become man. These chil- 
dren are said to have possessed great acuteness of 
sense, and to have shown cunning, skill, and en- 
durance in their search for food, but they ran on 
all fours, and were entirely without speech. One 
bleated like a sheep; another had a voice like a 
bear's; a third acted in all resjiects like a beast of 
prey. In all of them the brain was not only unde- 
veloped, but had so far lost its plasticity as to make 
any high grade of development impossible. The 
narratives of such forest and mountain children 



SELF-MAKING. 39 

help lis to realize that the infant achieves human- 
ity through his recoil against and assimilation of 
his spiritual environment. 

Pondering the facts to which I have briefly re- 
ferred, we begin to understand what deep meaning 
lurks in the contrast between the young animal and 
the young child. It means that the former is a 
made being, the latter a self-making being. It 
means that the animal is an isolated being, the 
child a social being. It means that the animal is 
imprisoned in hereditary tendencies and aptitudes, 
and that his Avhole life consists of reflex and in- 
stinctive actions monotonously repeated. It means 
that the infant is plastic and versatile, and hence 
that he is not the prisoner of the past, but the 
prophet of the future. It means that man is a 
teachable and improvable being, that evolution 
is apotheosized into education, that each indi- 
vidual must learn from all other individuals, 
and must in turn contribute his quota to the 
common store of human experience. Finally, 
it means that while the brute is irresponsible 
and mortal, man is responsible and immortal, 
for all perishable beings perish through defect, 
and the characteristic quality of humanity is pre- 



4:0 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

cisely tlie ability to overcome defect. Hence the 
helplessness of the infant is the pledge of his 
dignity and the promise of his unlimited develop- 
ment.* 

Now for the relationship of these facts to nur- 
sery education. Since man is a social being he de- 
mands from the beginning of life the nurture of his 
sympathies. Since he is a self-making being he 
demands from the beginning of life the discipline 
of his energies. 

In our study of the Falling Song we traced 
the genesis of faith, which is one of the primitive 
expressions of sympathy. In the Play with the 
Limbs, which is to be the subject of this letter, we 
shall find a disclosure of the process by which ener- 
gy is incited and disciplined. The former jDlay sug- 
gests the general type of all efforts to nurture sym- 
pathy, the latter, the general type of all efforts to 
foster activity. These two games are, therefore, 
prototypes of all the Mother-Plays whose general 
aim is to set in balanced motion the centripetal and 

* Readers interested in the Meaning of Infancy are referred 
for fuller statement to Professor John Fiske's books, Cosmic 
Philosophy, The Destiny of Man, and the Excursions of an 
Evolutionist, to Mr. Drummond's Ascent of Man, and to the 
Meaning of Education, by Prof. Xicholas jMurray Butler. 



SELF-MAKING. 41 

centrifugal forces of the soul, and thus to determine 
its circular orbit. 

Scene second in the drama of infancy shows us 
the baby striking out vigorously with arms and 
legs, while in response to the indicated need the 
mother offers her opposing hands as an incentive to 
effort and a guide to force. The clew to the game 
is given clearly in Froebel's Commentary, wherein 
he explains that nothing gives the mother such joy 
as her child's overflowing life, and that her deepest 
longing is to nurture life. This statement puzzled 
me for many years because I was not able to decide 
just what meaning Froebel attached to the word 
life. Gradually, however, as I studied his different 
books I became aware of a number of verbal triads 
through which he seemed to be struggling to ex- 
press kindred thoughts. Among them were life, 
love, light; act, feeling, thought; jDresentiment, 
perception, recognition; identity, contrast, media- 
tion of contrast; child of Xature, child of man, 
child of God; Avhole, member, member-whole; uni- 
versality, particularity, singularity; unity, mani- 
foldness, individuality. Collecting and comparing 
these several triads I began to understand them and 
to recognize that their common key was that in- 



42 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

sight into the nature of reason or self -consciousness 
which I tried to explain to you in my last letter. 
The self is an " identity pervading its own distinc- 
tions." The true self in each man is identical with 
the true self in all other men, and this universal 
self is the divine self, " the Christ in man which is 
the hope of glory." The divine self, however, is 
transcendent as well as immanent, or, to borrow the 
apostolic statement, the God who is in all and 
through all is also over all. Spiritual development 
is increasing participation in His eternal thought 
and will. Spiritual death is separation from Him. 
Activity is the initial manifestation of the indwell- 
ing divinity, just as faith is the initial form of 
union between the immanent and the transcendent 
selfhood. 

In the light of this truth the first term of each 
triad becomes transparent. Life is the unconscious 
totality of being; activity its germinal manifesta- 
tion; presentiment the witness of its presence; 
identity the statement of its undifferentiated sim- 
plicity; unity the disclosure of its oneness with the 
all; wholeness or universality the definition of its 
ideal nature; child of ^Nature the expression of its 
limitation and its affiliation with those lower orders 



SELF-MAKING. 43 

of being wherein tlie universal reason sleeps and 
dreams. With these solntions of the first term of 
each triad you can easily unfold the other terms 
yourself, and I will only ask you now to keep 
clearly in mind the thought of life as that ener- 
getic wholeness and fullness of being which never 
during the term of our mortal existence rises into 
complete consciousness. We are more than we 
know, and we know more than we do. " The soul is 
essentially active; the activity of which we are con- 
scious is but a part of our total activity, and volun- 
tary activity is but a part of our conscious activity." 
Our conscious and voluntary lives are therefore 
merely island peaks rising out of the depths of 
an unconscious ocean of being. Life is deeper, 
richer, fuller than conscious thought and will — it 
is the infinite obscure which eternity must illumi- 
nate. 

According to Emerson, the Chinese sage Men- 
cius perceived that man's chief duty was " to nour- 
ish well his vast flowing vigor." " I beg to ask 
what you call vast flowing vigor? " said his com- 
panion. " The explanation," replied Mencius, " is 
difficult. This vigor is supremely great and in the 

highest degree unbending. Xourish it correctly 
5 



44 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

and do it no injury, and it will fill up the vacancy 
between lieaven and eartli." * 

The greatest achievement of science has been 
the reduction of jSTature to a torrent of force. In 
the inorganic world this force appears variously as 
light, heat, magnetism, and electricity. In the or- 
ganic world it manifests itself as life. Philosophy 
resolves this torrent of force into a torrent of will. 
Energy of life means that the individual soul is 
flooded with this mysterious torrent, fed with 
abundant supplies from the inexhaustible fountain 
of originality and power. Love is energy of life in 
the form of feeling; genius is energy of life in the 
form of intellect; heroism is energy of life in the 
form of will. 'No wonder, therefore, that each 
mother's heart throbs with joy as she beholds in her 
infant that ceaseless movement which is the primal 
revelation of an unconscious fullness of life; no 
wonder that her deepest impulse is to nourish well 
this " vast flowing vigor." " In the beginning is 
the act." From the act proceed feeling and 
thought. To the act they return and with deeds 
fired by feeling and illuminated by thought the 
circle of development becomes complete. 
* Emerson's Essays, second series, p. 75. 



SELF-MAKING. 45 

Strangely enough, while the nurture of life is 
a deep maternal impulse, the average mother is too 
often faithless to its promptings, and many of the 
worst mistakes in nursery education can only be 
avoided by lifting into consciousness the ideal latent 
in instinct and revealed by Froebel in his Play with 
the Limbs. The child is restless and fretful be- 
cause he is idle. Instantly the mother or nurse be- 
gins to divert and amuse him. She tells a story, 
sings a song, acts a pantomime, builds a block house, 
sets in orderly procession the animals belonging to 
a Xoali's ark. Instead of leading the child to do, 
she does for him, and thus fosters idleness, exact- 
ingness, and the craving for passive amusement. 
Since all passive pleasures create a keener appetite, 
and since they themselves can only sate and cloy 
but never satisfy, it is evident that in making the 
child dependent upon them the mother is sowing 
seeds of misery for him and for herself. Universal 
laws can never be broken with impunity, and the 
universal and inexorable law of habit is that all 
sensations pall with repetition, while all activities 
augment their joy. 

There are two forms of sloth. One is the inertia 
of a phlegmatic nature; the other is the instabil- 



46 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

ity of a frivolous nature. The outcome of tlie 
former is that sullenness of character which repels 
affection; the outcome of the latter is that selfish 
exactingness which wears out affection. Dante 
has branded both types of sluggishness in his 
Inferno, showing us on the one hand the sullen 
souls immersed in mire, and on the other the caitiff 
train of the pleasure seekers chasing forever the 
whirling banner of change, goaded forever by the 
hornets and gadflies of caj)ricious impulse and petty 
vexation. 

In the be^innino; of life inertia and frivolitv are 
mere tendencies with which it is comparatively easy 
to cope. They are enemies whom the soul may 
meet and vanquish in an open field. Grant them 
time and they intrench themselves in the strong- 
hold of habit, and make the soul their captive. I 
do not say that for this captive there is no escape. 
I say only that by failure to incite the child to 
battle the mother exposes him to a weary siege, and 
since his power diminishes as his chains are forged, 
her feeble indulgence must indefinitely increase the 
stress of his conflict and postpone in exact propor- 
tion the hour of victory. 

As I write I hear your protest. It is easy to 



SELF-MAKINa. 47 

say what oiiglit to be done, but can I or any other 
theorist realize how many stumbling stones are 
strewn along the path of all general principles? I 
think I can. I know that the science of education 
is one thing, and the art of education another. I 
know how different is the insight which merely rec- 
ognizes a general truth from the prompt and unper- 
plexed tact which solves problems in the concrete. 
I simply claim that to know what we must do, helps 
us to find out how to do it. 

" Consider," says Froebel, " either the seed or 
the egg; watch the development alike of feeling 
and of thought. Out of the indefinite the definite 
is born." Foster the child's activity, and it will rise 
to productive energy; exercise productive energy, 
and it will blossom into original creation. Let the 
nurture of sympathy go hand-in-hand with the in- 
citement to activity, and from the union of the two 
will spring humility and helpfulness. Divorce sym- 
pathy from activity and it collapses into that in- 
ordinate craving for approbation which has been de- 
fined as the " love of love by sin defiled." Divorce 
activity from sympathy and it will give rise to the 
lust of power. Refuse nurture to both these ele- 
mentary impulses, and from the union of their 



48 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

opposites, slotli and selfishness, will spring in tlie 
first generation, self-indulgence and presumption; 
in tlie second, parasitism and cowardice; in the 
third, fatalism; and in the fourth, the family line 
of these ancestral ills will end with defiance and 
desj)air. 

Do I seem to be exaggerating the dangers of 
sloth? Is it not true that " Idleness standing in the 
midst of unattempted tasks is always proud," and 
that he who has done nothing is most ready to be- 
lieve in his own ability to do everything? Is it not 
true that when with untried strength he is forced to 
confront the tasks of life he either falls into the 
ranks of those who through cowardice " make great 
refusals," or by reckless scheming involves himself 
in practical ruin? Is it not true that he who can 
not lean upon himself must lean upon others, and 
that he who is himself will-less must fall into the 
worship of blind chance or inexorable fate? AVhat, 
indeed, are chance and fate but the projection of 
his own wayward caprice, and his own blind and 
hence unregulated passions? 

Man is only what he makes himself to be. Man 
can make himself only that which ideally he is. 
Through activity he creates himself. In activity he 



SELF-MAKING. 49 

reveals himself. Recognizing these truths you will 
begin to question yourself anxiously as to the meth- 
ods by which energy may be incited, guided, re- 
strained, and developed. With this problem in 
mind turn to the picture which illustrates Froebel's 
Play with the Limbs. Against the baby's kicking 
feet the mother presses her hands. The stream has 
been dammed that its force may turn the mill 
wheel. Below the dam a little boy has set his toy 
mill in the stream. His thoughtful brother watches 
the turning toy, trying to understand how and 
why the water keeps it going so merrily. The gen- 
eral thought of the picture is that, lacking con- 
straint, force diffuses and wastes itself. To be effec- 
tive it must be pent up. The old myth makes Her- 
cules begin his career by strangling in his cradle 
the serpents that attack his life. We must create a 
tension in order to guide the force of the child in 
definite directions, and by inciting him to resist- 
ance fortify in him the love of exertion, and waken 
in him the sense of power. Applied to the force of 
will this insight explains the significance of inhibi- 
tion as the method of specific choice and action. 
We do one thing by virtue of not doing other 
tilings. We give vent to one impulse by inhibiting 



50 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

a number of other impulses; we concentrate atten- 
tion upon one object by repelling the seductions of 
other objects. To the facts that our minds are be- 
sieged by colliding sensations, and that our souls 
are the battleground of colliding impulses, we owe 
our ascent from involuntary to voluntary activity. 
After voluntary activity has been attained it 
is by freely choosing among different and op- 
jjosing possibilities that will is exercised and 
character formed, and it is also by a series of in- 
tellectual exclusions that we rise from attention 
to analysis, and from analysis to still higher orders 
of knowing. The practical application of this 
insight to early education creates a procedure 
admirably defined by Miss Garland as the meth- 
od of restricted freedom. It consists in so far 
limiting the range of choice as to give a specific 
trend to activity, and it avoids both the extreme 
of formalism and that yet more dangerous ex- 
treme of license which is the hideous caricature of 
liberty. 

The evolution of energy through antagonism is 
a general law. But the particular form which 
energy will assume must be determined by indi- 
vidual bent and aptitude. Hence Froebel's picture 



SELF-MAKING. 51 

sliows also the limitations of its principle. Each 
child in the picture is fascinated by the mysterious 
force of the swift-rushing stream, but each is incited 
to a different activity, and in this activity reveals 
his or her individuality. 

In a letter to his cousin, Madame Schmidt, 
Froebel urges her to consider that " wherever 
healthy life buds forth, there new life only un- 
folds itself to meet and overcome various obstacles; 
nay, further, that these obstacles in a certain sense 
are actually necessary for strengthening and for- 
tifying the young life." " Let us," he adds, " look 
closely at the buds of our trees, and see how 
thick and close are the coverings which lock 
them uj), and how slowly and with what resist- 
ance these coverings are burst open before the 
tender little leaves appear; or let us look at 
the kernel, or the seed-corn, which a still stronger 
chain holds fettered, till the feeble germinat- 
ing point can shake itself free; or, finally, let 
us look at the helpless infant and its birth. 
Obstacles," he concludes, " are not appointed 
by providence with the design of repelling newly 
uprising life, but with the purpose of strength- 
ening it at once upon its first appearance, and 



52 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

of making evident tlie meaning of that appear- 
ance." * 

That children who are brought up " simply and 
naturally never evade but rather seek obstacles " 
has been noticed by Froebel in the Education of 
Man. 

" Let it lie," the vigorous youngster exclaims to 
his father, who is about to roll a piece of wood out 
of the boy's way; "let it lie; I can get over 
it." With diiSculty, indeed, the boy gets over 
it the first time, but he has accomplished the feat 
by his own strength. Strength and courage have 
grown in him. He returns, gets over the ob- 
stacle a second time, and soon he learns to clear 
it easily. If activity brought joy to the child, work 
now gives delight to the boy. Hence, the dar- 
ing and venturesome feats of boyhood, the ex- 
ploration of caves and ravines, the climbing 
of trees and mountains, the searching of the 
heights and depths, the roaming through fields 
and forests. 

The most difficult thing seems easy, the most 
daring thing seems without danger to him, for his 

* Froebel's Letters. Translated by E. Michaelis and H. 
Keatley Moore, p. 60. 



SELF-MAKING. 53 

promptings come from his innermost lieart and 
will." * 

I well know liow hard it is to resist the fear 
which deters us from giving children occasion to 
cope with difficulties, conquer obstacles, confront 
reasonable perils. Yet I also know that if you wish 
to develop Harold's strength and manliness you 
must be ready to let him do and dare. Nor is it 
less true that if, as he grows older, you wish to 
develop his intellect you must avoid making the 
path of knowledge too smooth, broad, and easy, and 
if you wish to develop his moral energy you must 
permit him to grapple with moral problems. 

The parents of a bright child are often victims 
to senseless exaggerations of his ability and sense- 
less fears for his health. He is so clever he does 
not need to study, and so nervous and high-strung 
that he should not study. So when he is sent to 
school the teacher is enjoined not to push him, and 
he is kept in a class where he has nothing to do. 
Ey the time he is ten years old he has fallen in 
actual attainment behind the average child, has be- 
come so idle that it is impossible to make him work, 
and so conceited that he is an offense to all rational 

* Education of Man. Ilailniann's Translation, p. 103. 



54 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

Ijersons. His intellectual and moral debauchery is 
completed by home indulgence and the excuses 
woven by maternal vanity. As less and less is ex- 
acted of him he naturally exacts more and more of 
others, until at last his petty tyrannies become in- 
supportable, and the regime of foolish indulgence 
is superseded by a regime of futile scoldings, 
threats, and punishments. 

I should not express myself so strongly on this 
point were I not sure that hundreds of children are 
ruined because enough is not expected of them. 
The keener your realization of this peril, the more 
earnestly will you incite your infant Hercules to 
strangle, while still in his cradle, the twin serpents 
of sloth and selfishness. In your efforts to incite 
and discipline his energies you must, however, be 
careful to keep a just balance between his strength 
and the obstacles you ask him to overcome. AVill 
may be paralyzed as well as dissipated, and through 
the failures born of attempts to graj^ple with over- 
whelming difficulties the child may be made moody 
and cowardly. Moreover, his affections are re- 
pelled from the mother or teacher who asks of him 
what even with his best effort he can not do, while 
conversely the impetuous currents of his love flow 



SELF-MAKING. 55 

freely toward all tliose wlio procure for liim that 
elation of S]3irit which is the fine flower of success- 
ful achievement. Finally, it is from many small 
successes that he wins courage and modesty. Be- 
coming accustomed to strife and victory, he learns 
just what he may venture to attempt, and in the 
end grows caj)al)le of that " reasoned rashness " 
which all great emergencies demand and all great 
successes imply. 

By many persons Froebel is supjiosed to be the 
avowed champion of two very popular, very plausi- 
ble, but very dangerous educational heresies, 
against which his whole system is a protest. One 
of these heresies has been called sugar-plum educa- 
tion, the other has been fitly baptized flower-pot 
education. Sugar-plum education in its moral 
aspect means coaxing, cajolery, and bribery; in its 
intellectual aspect it is the parent of that specious 
and misleading maxim that the chief aim of the 
educator is to interest the child. Like the theory 
which wrecks happiness by making it the aim of 
life, the effort to win interest results in methods 
which kill interest. The end of life is not happi- 
ness, but goodness; the aim of education is not to 
interest the child, but to incite and guide his self- 



56 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

activity. Seeking goodness we win happiness; in- 
citing self-activity we quicken interest. Please say 
to Helen tliat nnless she wishes her kindergarten 
to be a wretched parody of Froebel's ideal she will 
say to herself, not " I mnst interest the children," 
hut " I must get and hold their attention," The 
kindergartner who lashes herself into a dramatic 
frenzy 'when playing the games, and talks herself 
hoarse in vain attempts to interest her children in 
their gifts, too often remains serenely complacent in 
face of their phlegmatic indifference to her well- 
meant endeavors. Has she not done everything 
to interest them? They must, she thinks, be pecul- 
iarly unresponsive children; or perhaps they have 
been spoiled at home ! If she would propose to her- 
self the objective test, and frankly admit that unless 
she can hold attention she is a failure, she would 
hit upon devices appealing more to the self-activity 
of the pupils. Striving for attention she would 
win interest. For true interest can neither be se- 
duced nor compelled; it must be incited. 

These hints will help you to understand sugar- 
plum education. IsTow for the flower-pot. Flower- 
pot education means the effort to make the child 
wise and good through the influence of an arti- 



SELF-MAKING. 57 

iiciallj perfect environment. You will take your 
tender plant out of tlie common ground and away 
from the common air and keep it safe by setting it 
in a sunny window of your own room. The strug- 
gle for life may mean something for other plants, 
but you will improve on the divine method in rear- 
ing your choice rose. Two false assumptions are 
latent in your procedure : first, the assumption that 
character may be formed without effort; and sec- 
ond, the assumption that evil is only outside your 
child, and not at all in him. 

Both flower-pot and sugar-plum education are 
attacks upon freedom. The former holds that the 
child may be molded by environment, the latter 
that his blind im23ulses may be played upon by the 
educator. Froebel holds that he is a free being, and 
therefore must be a self-making being. Hence, 
while sugar-plum education appeals to the activity 
of the educator, and flower-pot education to the 
activity of environment, Froebel appeals first, last, 
and always to the self -activity of the child. 

Contemporary students of childhood claim such 
a monopoly of the insight into motor activity as the 
point of departure for a wise nurture of infancy 
that it sometimes seems as if they really believed 



58 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

tliat before tlie rise of tlie new psychology no one 
had ever noticed how babies love to kick. The 
kindergartner, however, may proudly point to the 
Play with the Limbs in proof of the fact that 
Froebel at least anticipated the wisdom of our later- 
day prophets, and if she is courageous she may even 
insist that in his description of the ascending stages, 
through which motor activity is transfigured into 
creative self-revelation, the founder of the kinder- 
garten and author of the Mother-Play has far sur- 
passed any recent child student. Froebel's great 
insight is that the human being is a self-expressing 
being. As a baby he expresses his abounding full- 
ness of life in incessant movement. Through move- 
ment his inner force strengthens and unfolds, and 
he becomes an imitative being. Making himself 
into dog, cat, flower, bird, father, mother, brother, 
sister, tradesman, soldier, preacher, he makes over 
these objects and persons into himself. From imi- 
tation he rises to transforming and productive activ- 
ity, and strives to stamp himself upon the little 
world which through imitation he had stamped 
upon himself. Finally, he establishes within his 
soul the two contrasting yet complementary activi- 
ties of self-revelation and investigation, and while 



SELF-MAKING. 59 

on the one hand he expresses his own ideals in plas- 
tic, j)ictorial, verbal, or musical form, he strives, on 
the other, to discover by ceaseless search the mean- 
ing of the world in which he finds himself. The 
dnty of education is to utilize the ascending modes 
of self-activity so as to help them realize their own 
unconscious aim. The Mother-Play songs and the 
kindergarten gifts are Froebel's carefully chosen 
means to this end. The Play with the Limbs and 
the Palling Song are the terminus ah quo of the 
whole jDrocess of development because they seize 
upon the primordial manifestations of generic self- 
hood. Abounding vitality expressed in movement 
is the primal revelation of the God in the soul; 
faith is the primal outreaching of the God in the 
soul toward the God in the world. 

One more question must be touched upon be- 
fore we say good-bye to the Play with the Limbs. 
Why does the instinctive mother love to talk and 
sing, to her child long before he is able to under- 
stand words or catch melodies? Why does Proebel 
insist that each of his little games shall be accom- 
panied by word and song? It is only necessary to 
put these questions to begin to suspect their an- 
swers. It is through the frequent association of 
6 



60 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

words with objects and acts that the child comes to 
connect sounds with ideas, and it is through imitat- 
ing these sounds that he becomes a language-using 
being. Hence he should hear much speaking, and 
the connections between words and the objects and 
acts for which they stand should be often and 
clearly pointed out. Maternal instinct has met the 
first of these needs, but has not adequately re- 
sponded to the second. One great merit of Froe- 
bel's games is that they associate elementary sensa- 
tions with the words through which they are desig- 
nated, and throw into relief the connection between 
word and sensation by means of gesture. 

In addition to its intellectual incitement the 
mother's prattle has a moral influence, and this is 
augmented when song is added to word. For 
through prattle and song the child learns to know 
his mother's voice, and this voice soothes, calms, 
attracts him though he understands not a word of 
what is said. Love for his mother's voice renders 
him at a later stage of development more obedi- 
ent to its commands, more susceptible to its 
appeals. Who shall say how far maternal influence 
may be increased or diminished by the presence 
or absence of fibers of experience connecting 



SELF-MAKING. 61 

the conscious with the unconscious periods of 
life? 

In Froebel's oi:)inion song has a still deeper im- 
port, for he recognizes in music the natural lan- 
guage of emotion, and believes that love, the mel- 
ody of the heart, is revealed in the melody of the 
voice. Hence in his commentary on the Kicking 
Song he explains that the mother's song is born of 
her longing to nourish her baby's feeling. He shall 
not only learn through her oi:)posing hands to 
know her strength and his own: in some slight 
degree he must feel the tenderness that inspires 
her act. Hence in song she seeks to reveal 
herself as love, just as through pressure she reveals 
herself as power. Since the presentiments of in- 
fancy help to determine the thought of maturity, 
and since in the relationship of the child to its 
mother is foreshadowed the relationship of the soul 
to God, I think you can not too seriously consider 
the suggestion that you should never oppose your 
boy without revealing love as the motive of your 
opposition. Love shining through your prohibi- 
tions and penalties will help him to believe in the 
love which hides under all the contradictions of 
life. The rebellious Titan chained to the rock and 



62 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

gnawed by the vulture, images tlie inevitable out- 
come of finite struggle against omnipotence con- 
ceived as divorced from love. Job, bereft of prop- 
erty, health, friends, family, declaring in his ashes 
and desolation, " Though He slay me, yet will I 
trust in Him," is the immortal type of strength de- 
veloped through trial Avhen trial is recognized as 
coming from God. To conquer an unshaking faith 
in love as the moving principle of the universe is 
to win the victory of life. 

From movement to the life force back of move- 
ment; from single force to the complex of forces; 
from the complex of forces to the educational im- 
port of restrictions and obstacles; from the mean- 
ing of obstacles to the love which provides them — 
such has been the path over which this letter has 
traveled. I hope that from the point we have now 
reached you clearly perceive that the general aim of 
a wise nurture is to help the child wear deep chan- 
nels and rear confining banks for the impetuous cur- 
rents of life. Diffused force is wasted force, and 
mere instinctive activity must be transformed into 
conscious voluntary and specific deeds. 

You will best follow the evolution of Froebel's 
ideal by constantly recurring to the definition of 



SELF-MAKING. 63 

life as unconscious participation in universal ener- 
gy, and to the definition of infant education as the 
nurture of this hidden yet impetuous force. These 
insights will teach you what Froebel means by fol- 
lowing the child. They will explain the crownless 
tree in the Grass Mowing picture, and declare to you 
why it was that blighted by the destruction of its 
life impulse it could yield neither flowers nor fruit. 
They will help you to understand why so many 
children hide their real selves from their parents, 
and in lieu of frank and tender companionship give 
back to them parrot repetitions of their own max- 
ims and monkey imitations of their mannerisms. 
They will teach you why many shallow persons 
remain throughout life mere dotards of custom or 
blind slaves of fashion, and do not even give a sign 
that somewhere behind this mask there is at least an 
infinitesimal selfhood. Perhaps they may awaken 
you to a realization of the sad fact that the origin- 
ality of sensitive and conscientious children is often 
sapped and their integrity threatened by the effort 
to be all they are taught they ought to be, and last 
but not least, they will make it impossible for you 
to withhold your pity from souls who have sought 
in lawlessness the freedom they should have found 



64 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

in wisely directed energies. Then upon you as upon 
me will grow tlie conviction that Froebel never 
spoke wiser word than when he declared that the 
aim of true motherhood is the " nurture of life," 
and that the one unpardonable sin is to quench the 
mysterious energy in which lies hidden all we are 
and all we hope to become. 

We shall not study Froebel's book in Froe- 
bel's spirit unless before dismissing the Play with 
the Limbs we seek to win from it help for our- 
selves as well as for the children. I shall, therefore, 
bring this letter to a close by suggesting a few of 
the thoughts which have stirred my mind while I 
have been writing it. 

Since man is only that which he makes himself 
to be, the vainest of all vain glorying is glory in 
what he calls his potentialities. The potential is 
that which is not. There are no deedless Alexan- 
ders. There are no inarticulate Shakespeares. 
Deeds made the one, dramas created the other. 
Ideally each man is all men, actually each man is 
what he achieves, and the history of a man, so says 
Goethe, is his character. 

Neither is it sufficient to have achieved. Man 
may never lay back upon his oars. The happy 



SELF-MAKING. 65 

warrior goes from " well to better," and is " daily 
self -surpassed." Each attained degree of conscious- 
ness must spur us to invade new realms of tlie un- 
conscious. Each attained degree of character is 
kept only by being outgrown. Sulking in his tent, 
Achilles is no hero; dallying in Calypso's Isle, 
Odysseus ceases to be the man of wisdom. 

But weak as is the man who glories in his pos- 
sibilities, he who casts the blame of his defeat upon 
circumstances is weaker still. There are no circum- 
stances over which man may not triumph by con- 
quest or by that endurance which is " all the pas- 
sion of great souls." " I count life," says Brown- 
ing, " just a stuff to try the soul's strength on." 
" God," writes the devout Thomas a Kemj^is, 
" grants us occasions of contest in order to bless us 
with opportunities of victory." Increase in the 
number and strength of the obstacles which beset 
the soul, is the pledge of ascent to a higher class in 
the great school of life. " Then welcome each re- 
buff that turns earth's smoothness rough " ; wel- 
come the frost that stings, the flame that consumes, 
tlie rack of jiain, the flood of sorrow, the two-edged 
sword of spiritual conflict, the tragic mystery 
which concentrates life by limiting its term — the 



66 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

whole blessed world-order wliicli clashing with 
man's ignorant self-will makes possible his ascent 
into the heavenly realm of freedom. 

Yet even, sloth, and selfishness, and cowardice 
can not destroy the nature of the soul, and for the 
free spirit it is never too late. Yainly does material- 
ism teach the extinction of the will. For will as 
for thought and love there is no extinction. They 
partake of the eternal. We owe much to the doc- 
trine of hell for keeping before us its solemn asser- 
tion of this pregnant truth. Man can not be pun- 
ished unless he is responsible, neither can he be 
responsible unless he is free, and therefore capable 
of amendment. Should he lose his freedom even 
through his own sin, he could no longer be pun- 
ished for sinning. Implicit in the doctrine of hell 
is the insight which triumphs over hell. It was a 
daring saying of Novalis that " God wills gods." 
His will must j^revail. Therefore neither should 
any individual despair for himself, nor parents 
suffer heartbreak over their erring children, nor 
teachers lose hope of the most recalcitrant pupil. 

"For I have seen all winter long the thorn 
First show itself intractable and fierce, 
And after bear the rose upon its top." 



LETTER III. 

FROM WIND TO SPIRIT. 

Watch as your baby grows, and you will see 
That his whole life, wherever he may be, 
Is a perpetual mimicry. 

An engine now, he puffs with all his might ; 
Anon, with brows perplexed, he feigns to write — 
Or strides his chair, a mounted knight. 

Brimming with life, but knowing not as yet 
Even the letters of his alphabet, 
He imitates each pattern set. 

And watching him, perchance you question why 
Each new activity that meets his eye 
Excites him his own skill to try. 

His is an instinct ignorantly wise ! 

Onhj in doing can he realize 

The thing that's done beneath his eyes. 

A stranger 'midst the surging life of men, 
He to his own life-stature shall attain 
By taking — to give back again. 

Henrietta E. Eliot. 

THE WEATHEEVANE. 

This way, that way. 

Turns the weather-vane ; 
This way, that way. 
Turns and turns again. 
Turning, pointing, ever showing, 
How the merry wind is blowiiig. 

Emilie Poulsson. 
67 




63 



FROM WIND TO SPIRIT. 69 

Dear : Tlie session of our motliers' class 

yesterday was an unusually animated one. At the 
previous meeting I had asked the mothers to notice 
their children carefully and to rejDort all the imita- 
tive actions which might occur during the week. 
The response was general and the results of observa- 
tion very interesting. A baby fifteen weeks old had 
tried to purse his lips when his mother went 
through with this movement close in front of him. 
A boy of seven months had successfully imitated 
movements of the head. Several babies aged ten 
months had noticed and repeated the act of beckon- 
ing with the forefinger. A little girl of nine 
months had given her doll a bath, had kissed it as 
she herself was kissed, and had tried to sing it to 
sleep. A fifteen-months-old boy had gone through 
with the movements of shaving his chin. Another 
of the same age had pretended to read aloud, mov- 
ing his finger along the lines of a book and modulat- 
ing his voice. A little girl of twenty months had 
seen some flying pigeons, and had quickly and re- 
peatedly opened and shut her fingers in imitation of 
their movement. A boy three years and a half old 
had happened to see a butcher kill some pigs, and in 
a spirit of imitation had arranged pieces of wood 



70 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

and prepared to do the same. A somewliat older 
child had fastened feathers from an old duster to his 
little coat and hopped about the yard, scratching 
the ground as he had seen chickens do. A little 
girl had given herself a bad hurt by spreading her 
arms for wings and trying to fly from a high porch. 
Had this effort succeeded she intended her next 
flight to be from the roof of this same porch, which 
she could easily reach by climbing through her 
nursery window. This child, if I remember aright, 
was about six years old. Many other observations 
were reported, but as those already given are 
amply sufficient to illustrate the subject of this 
letter I spare you any further examples of the 
fact of imitation, and hasten to suggest its mean- 
ing.* 

It was amusing to watch the change which stole 
over the spirit of the maternal dream as the reports 
accumulated. The complacency and pride which 
were evident in the tones and expressions of the 
mothers who made the earlier reports contrasted 

* Wishing my illustrations to be reliable, particularly as 
to the ages of children, I have borrowed freely from Pro- 
fessor Preycr. See The Senses and the AVill, pp. 282-293. 
The imitation of the butcher is recorded by Pestalozzi of his 
son. 



FROM WIND TO SPIRIT. 71 

amusingly with the matter-of-fact rehearsals of 
those who followed them. A two-horned dilemma 
seemed gradually to define itself. Either each of 
the fifty mothers present was the possessor of a re- 
markable child, or imitativeness was no mark of 
unusual mental power. The question was brought 
to a climax by a spinster of scientific proclivities, 
whose latest hobby is the Simian intellect, and who 
followed up the reports of the mothers with a 
series of anecdotes illustrating the imitativeness 
of monkeys. A general and hearty laugh fol- 
lowing her remarks showed which horn of the 
dilemma had been seized by the collective mind of 
the class. 

Surrendering imitation as a mark of individ- 
ual distinction we win it as the characteristic of 
an essential stage in the j)rocess of psychogenesis. 
The act of imitation proves that the infant has be- 
come conscious of his own power to originate move- 
ments, and that he voluntarily exercises this power. 
Hence, as Professor Preyer has pointed out, it is the 
first sure sign of the birth of will. Pondering this 
fact we begin to understand the psychologic instinct 
which led Froebel to follow the Kicking Game, 
whose motive is the solicitation of force, with the 



72 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

Weathervane, which is an initial attempt to influ- 
ence the activity of imitation. 

Coeval with the nascent consciousness of his 
own causal 23ower is the child's recognition of 
causal energy as the source of the movements he 
repeats. Mr. Ilowells relates that when his little 
daughter Avas puzzled by the attitudes of certain 
figures in the great pictures which she ambitiously 
attempted to copy, she took the poses herself and 
explained that " she then saw how they felt." This 
little girl had become conscious of the latent motive 
which incites to imitation and which is nothing else 
than an attempt to interpret alien activity by repro- 
ducing it. As Froebel explains: " What the child 
imitates he is trying to understand," and his act im- 
plies an unconscious process of introspection 
through which he comes to the conclusion that just 
as he originates his movements, so the movements 
he perceives are originated by causal energies 
analogous to his own. 

If you have followed this analysis of the act 
of imitation you will understand the delight witli 
which you greeted Harold's first attempt to repeat 
the activities of persons and things about him. In 
my last letter I tried to show you that man is a 



FROM WIND TO SPIRIT. 73 

self-making being and hence a free being. My 
chief aim in this correspondence will be to call your 
attention to those phenomena of child life which 
mark ascending degrees in the concrete realization 
of freedom. Imitation is interesting and important 
because it is one of the crises in the battle for lib- 
erty. The child who imitates has formed an ideal 
and energizes to realize it. This is the beginning 
of moral freedom. He has inferred a causal energy 
as the begetter of a perceptible effect. This is the 
beginning of intellectual freedom. All higher de- 
grees of moral freedom will be attained by the gen- 
eration of loftier ideals and through the self-disci- 
pline involved in their realization. All higher de- 
grees of intellectual freedom will be achieved 
through wider applications of the idea of causality. 
" A cause," says Dr. Harris, " is worth a whole 
series of effects. The hen in the nursery tale that 
laid the golden eggs was a living causal process, 
while the eggs were mere dead results or effects." 
Looking back of phenomena to the energies whicli 
produce them the mind throws off the tyranny of 
sense. 

It is important to add that while imitation re- 
veals the first stirring of cause, the impulsion of this 



74 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

idea is presupposed by all experience. Lacking the 
thoiiglit of cause we could not recognize sometliing 
objectively existent as the source of a sense im-. 
pression, and lacking such recognition we could 
never lift sensation into perception.* This insight 
forces us to startling conclusions. For if the idea 
of cause is the necessary condition of experience it 
can of course not be furnished by experience, and 
those psychologists who attempt to derive it from 
experience are engaged in the impossible task of 
proving that an ancestor can be begotten of its own 
offspring. Again, if it be not derived from ex- 
perience it must be given in the constitution of the 
mind, or, differently stated, its source must be the 
mind's own self-activity. Since, as we have already 
seen, the ascending degrees of thought are marked 
by the rise first from things to causes, and next from 
narrower to wider circles of causal energy, it is evi- 
dent that mental progress consists in getting farther 
and farther away from the data of sense, and in 
more and more consciously directing attention to 
the energy of mind. Strangest of all is the fact that 
it is precisely by this withdrawal from sense that 

* See Psychologic Foundations of Education, vol. xxxvi, 
International Education Series, p. 53. 



FROM WIND TO SPIRIT. 75 

we arrive at tlie underlying reality of the sensible 
world, or, in other words, that we learn to know 
the material cosmos not by an influx of things but 
by an efflux of the soul. 

Being a lover of Browning, you may remember 
a passage in his Paracelsus which states this pivotal 
psychologic truth. I always find poetic statements 
of great help. They illuminate my mind, and the 
association of a spiritual truth with a visible image 
seems to give it added authority. A symbol is Na- 
ture's vote in favor of an idea. I wonder if !N^ature 
could clothe a falsehood, and if the very fact 
that she consents to weave for a thought its visi- 
ble garment is not a proof of its substantial truth. 
However this may be, here is my passage 
from Browninc;: 



' Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise 
From outward things, whate'cr you may believe. 
There is an inmost center in us all 
Where truth abides in fullness ; and around, 
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in. 
This perfect, clear perception which is truth 
A baffling and jDerverting carnal mesh 
Blinds it and makes all error ; and to ' know ' 
Rather consists in opening out a way 
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape 
Than in effecting entry for a light 
Supposed to be without." 
7 



76 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

If imitation means all that I have said it means 
why do we feel such a contempt for formalists and 
pedants ? Simply because imitation is interesting as 
a rudimentary but unsatisfying as a vestigial form 
of thought and will. It is a mark of progressive de- 
velopment in the infant, but of arrested develop- 
ment in the man. Still, it is important that our 
impatience with the imitators should not go too far. 
Strong individuals, especially in youth, are often 
insurgents against social forms, and despisers of the 
stored-up heritage of wisdom. Duller natures are a 
kind of balance wheel in the complex machinery of 
life and should be duly appreciated. 

Since education is a series of responses to indi- 
cated needs, how shall the mother meet the new 
demand imposed by the arrival of her child at 
the imitative stage of development? I answer: 
First, by protecting him so far as possible from 
seeing or hearing what she would not wish him 
to reproduce. For since each activity in its re- 
coil contributes its quota to the shaping of char- 
acter it is obvious that what the child imitates he 
will tend to become. Xext, each mother should 
notice what special actions attract her child, and in- 
spire him to most frequent repetition. In this way 



FROM WIND TO SPIRIT. 1^7 

she will learn something of his specific individual- 
ity. Finally, there are certain activities whose re- 
production will have an educative value for all chil- 
dren. To indicate the most essential of these typ- 
ical acts is one purpose of the Mother-Play. 

Before we proceed to the study of these typical 
imitations a few w^ords of caution are necessary. 
'No imitative play should be taught the child until 
he is able to associate with it some definite though 
not necessarily adequate idea. He should not be 
called on to go through such games for the amuse- 
ment of older people, neither should he ever be 
praised for playing them well. They are the seri- 
ous business of infancy, and should be treated with 
gravity and respect. Finally, such plays must not 
be so numerous as to interfere with the develop- 
ment of independent thought, or to confuse the 
mind with too many suggestions. Please say to 
Helen in this connection that a very few additions 
to the games suggested by Froebel will give her all 
the plays she can possibly teach the children with 
advantage to their development, and one of the most 
disastrous results of the present tendency to mul- 
tiply song books is that the individual kinder- 
gartner either overloads the minds of her pupils 



Y8 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

and gives tliem spiritual indigestion, or tliat, be- 
wildered by variety, sbe sacrifices essential and typ- 
ical plays to those which have no educative value. 

Recognizing the fact that imitation is a search 
for causes we are ready to begin our study of the 
Weathervane. Remember that the first school of 
the soul is the " school of astonishment," and that, 
as Plato long since pointed out, the beginning of 
knowledge is in wonder. Since wonder expresses 
the tension of subject and object, it is evident that 
experiences lose their stimulus when they lose their 
novelty, and we justly esteem it a mark of high in- 
tellect to be piqued by the still unintelligible com- 
monplace. Upon thought as upon will custom 
presses " with a weight heavy as frost and deep 
almost as life," while conversely objects which are 
remote, and activities which are infrequent, stimu- 
late mental energy, and alike for the individual and 
the race the path to paradise is upon the ascending 
rounds of " the stairway of surprise." 

Dream yourself back into childhood, and try to 
realize the wonder with which the unaccustomed 
soul must confront the phenomena of wind, storm, 
lightning, and thunder. You will readily perceive 
that in presence of the latter phenomena fear 



FROM WIND TO SPIRIT. Y9 

blends with amazement, and that the immediate 
outcome of this complex emotion will probably 
be superstition and its recoil skepticism. Goethe 
relates that in very early childhood he began 
to settle into a serious disbelief in the benignity 
of Providence, incited thereto first by the shock 
of the Lisbon earthquake and later by the fool- 
ish conduct of those around him, " who on the 
occasion of a terrible thunderstorm dragged the 
boy and his sister into a dark passage, where the 
whole household, distracted with fear, tried to con- 
ciliate the angry deity by frightful groans and 
prayers." * Few persons nowadays act quite so 
insanely as this; still fear spreads by contagion 
from many a mother to many a child, and you must 
guard yourself from all unreasoning apprehension, 
and from all starts, outcries, and nervous frights if 
you wish Harold to be manly and courageous. 

The jDhenomena of wind as distinct from storm 
inspire no fear, but pure and simple wonder. 
Hence they stimulate the keenest search for their 
cause. Himself incarnate motion, the child finds 
himself in presence of a world in movement. At 
the same time he feels the breath of the wind and 

* Lewes, Life of Goethe. 



80 LETTEES TO A MOTHER. 

hears its voices. The first explanation which occurs 
to him is not that the wind moves objects, but that 
moving objects cause wind. The only movement 
of which he knows anything is self-movement, or 
movement which he easily traces back to self -move- 
ment. He moves himself; hence the Aveathervane, 
the windmill, the trees move themselves. He 
can cause wind by running, or by waving a fan, 
or rustling a newspaper. Hence the windmill, the 
trees, and other moving objects may make the 
strong wind he feels. So reasons the child. So 
reason to-day the Arizona Indians. 

It marks an intellectual crisis when the sus- 
picion arises that this primitive theory is false, and 
that the wind is not the product, but the producer, 
of the varied movements perceived. Historically, 
this crisis may be traced in many barbaric myths. 
As an experience of childhood it is doubtless pre- 
cipitated by intercourse with grown people. With 
this presentiment thought mounts, from the con- 
ception of different causal energies behind dif- 
ferent movements, to the thought of a single 
causal energy behind many movements. More- 
over, in ascribing many effects to a single 
cause the mind learns to separate as well as 



FROM WIND TO SPIRIT, 81 

connect cause and effect, and to conceive cause 
as an invisible power. Speculations with regard 
to the nature of this unseen energy next begin to 
occupy the mind, and by a process of unconscious 
analogizing the wind is invested with human or 
quasi-human attributes. Last of all, doubting his 
own solutions, the child carries the burning ques- 
tion to his elders, whom he besets with eager in- 
quiries as to what the wind is, and what makes the 
wind ? 

If you will study carefully Froebel's commen- 
tary on the Play of the Weathervane you will see 
that he points out how you may come to the aid of 
the infant mind, both in the earlier and the later 
stages of this process of spiritual evolution. Let 
it be stated at once that you are not limited to 
any particular imitation, but that the Weather- 
vane merely stands for the wind-blown object, 
whatever it may be, which most allures the child's 
interest. He is incited to repeat its movement, and 
led gradually to imitate the activity of other objects 
set in motion by the same unseen force. This is, 
of course, a process involving time, but it must be 
remembered that no one of Froebel's plays repre- 
sents a detached experience, but rather the moving 



82 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

principle of many experiences. Each game must 
be conceived on the one hand as a center from 
which influence radiates in all directions, and on 
the other as the vital germ of a particular thought 
which is to be developed by other experiences and 
by recurrence to the play itself at different in- 
tervals throughout the whole of early childhood. 
Thus the power of the implicit thought is made 
cumulative, and the watchful mother is able to trace 
its deepening and widening influence. 

Emerson has said » that language is fossil 
poetrj^ Max Miillcr has called it petrified phi- 
losophy. As poetry it preserves those corre- 
spondences between Nature and the soul which 
seized upon the imagination of primitive men. As 
johilosophy or psychology it reveals the wings 
upon which the soul soars into the upper air of 
thought. Tracing the pedigree of words we learn 
the ancestral forms of all spiritual ideas. And, 
since the process of spiritual evolution is alike 
in the individual and the race, a study of the 
words under which men originally strove to ex- 
press spiritual ideas gives us many a valuable hint 
with regard to the true method of developing such 
ideas in the mind of the child. It is, therefore, in- 



FROM WIND TO SPIRIT. 83 

teresting in connection with our Song of the Wind 
to recall the fact that by savages the soul is often 
described as " the air or breeze which passes in and 
out through the nostrils and the mouth," and that 
the breath has furnished the chief name for the 
soul not only to the Hebrew, Sanskrit, Latin, 
Greek, German, and English tongues, but also to 
many barbaric languages.* " The Latin word 
anirna meant originally blowing or breathing, and 
was derived from a root an to blow, which gives 
anila, wind in Sanscrit, and anemos, wind in Greek. 
In Greek the root thyein, to rush, gave the name 
thyella to the storm wind, and the name tliymos to 
the soul as the seat of the passions! " f *' Spirit, 
Latin spiritus, is derived from a verb spirare, which 
means to draw breath. The German Geist, the 
English ghost, has also the meaning of breath, while 
the lineage of the word soul shows clearly that our 
Teutonic ancestors conceived the principle of spirit- 
ual life as an inward sea, heaving up and down with 
every breath, like the ocean waves which swell and 
rise when the wind blows." ^ 

* Myths and Myth Makers, John Fiske, p. 225. 
f Science of Language, Max Miiller, Eng. Ed., vol. ii, p. 
436. 

X Science of Language, Max Miiller, Eng. Ed., vol. i, p. 523. 



84 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

The recoil of imagination against the mystery 
of the wind may also be traced in myth. Wind 
gods and wind-conquering heroes appear in all 
mythologies. The mysterious Mani of New Zea- 
land legend holds all the winds but the west in 
his hands, or imprisons them with great stones 
rolled to the mouths of their caves. In American 
folklore the four winds are personal divinities, each 
having his distinctive character, and Longfellow 
has made us familiar with Mudjekeewis the west 
wind, and his children: Wabun, the morning- 
briuger, Shawondasee, the lazy south wind, and 
the fierce Kabibonokka. Classic myth gives us 
^olus as wind imprisoner; Boreas, born of the 
Starry Heaven and the Dawn. Finally, our own 
Teutonic race contributes the beautiful legends of 
the Erl King and the Lorelei, the conception of 
" Runic Odin howling his war-song to the gale," 
and the image of that fierce Hrasvelg, who " sits at 
the end of heaven, a giant in eagle's disguise, and 
from whose wings the wind doth come over all 
mankind." 

In the effort to repeat these interesting chapters 
of race experience we must be careful not to carica- 
ture them. The steep and narrow path of true edu- 



FROM WIND TO SPIRIT. 85 

cation hngs the dangerous edge of a precipice. 
Yawning beneath it are the pits of sentimentalism 
and formalism. "VVe fall into sentimentalism when- 
ever we forget that the progress of thought is from 
object to subject, and that the young child lacks all 
conscious introspection. He knows many things 
before he begins to know himself. He must know 
all things before he can completely know himself. 
Hence we contradict all sound psychology when 
we attempt to divert his attention from visible and 
audible phenomena and direct it to the emotions 
which we imagine these phenomena ought to in- 
spire. Such effort to develop a premature subjec- 
tivity is the parent of hypocrisy and self-deception. 
Add to this sentimentalism the pedantry born of 
answering unasked questions, and you will have 
done all you can to destroy integrity and vigor of 
mind. It has been said that every premature defini- 
tion of virtue is the seed of a vice. It is equally 
true that every premature definition, or conscious 
statement of feeling is the seed of a sham, and that 
every premature question nips or kills some living 
seed of thought. 

Never, therefore, ask Harold such foolish ques- 
tions as " How does the wind make you feel ? " or 



86 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

" Wliat does the wind make you tliink? " Let liim 
wonder without contemplating his wonder. Let 
him think without thinking of his thought. Rend 
not with profane hands the veil which shrouds that 
holy of holies, a human soul. Remember that in 
reality symbols are the " safeguards of mystery," 
and that their value lies in the fact that in them 
there is both " concealment and revelation." Avoid 
also all questions as to what makes the wind, and 
above all, shun those crude and easy explanations 
which extinguish wonder without kindling thought, 
and whose only effect is to make the child feel that 
there can be no great mystery in the object so glibly 
talked about. The object of Froebel's Wind Song 
is to abet the unconscious dialectic through which 
the mind comes eventually to refer a variety of 
visible phenomena to the agency of a single invisi- 
ble force. It is a parody of his procedure to ask 
the question which it is the aim of the organic ex- 
periences suggested to evolve, and the fact that this 
and similar questions are asked again and again is 
one chief reason why his symbolic method is mis- 
understood and denounced. Observe in Froebel's 
commentary that even when the child questions 
about the wind he is not answered, but pointed to 



FROM WIND TO SPIRIT. 87 

another mystery. " My child," says the mother, 
" you can see your little hand move, but you can not 
see the force that moves it." There is but one mys- 
tery and one miracle, the miracle of free self -activ- 
ity. " Were it not miraculous," asks Carlyle, 
" could I stretch forth my hand and clutch the sun? 
Yet thou seest me daily stretch forth my hand and 
therewith clutch many a thing, and swing it hither 
and thither. Art thou a grown baby, then, to 
fancy that the miracle lies in miles of distance, or 
in pounds avoirdupois of weight, and not to see 
that the true inexplicable God-revealing miracle 
lies in this, that I can stretch forth my hand at 
all; that I have free force to clutch aught there- 
with? " 

Does it seem that in denying the right of ques- 
tion and explanation I leave but little for you to 
do? If so, try to realize the influence of music, 
poetry, gesture, and picture, and, what is still more 
important, understand that all truth must be rooted 
in, watered by, and brought to blossom through 
experiences which, beginning in infancy, recur 
throughout the whole of life. The Weathervano 
will mean little either to you or to Harold unless it 
incites you to give him plenty of outdoor life. Let 



88 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

the zephyrs fan his cheek. Let hhu battle with the 
storm wind. As he grows older do not fear to let 
him measure his strength against the wind on water 
as well as on land. Enrich him with the joys of 
Emerson's Avild-cyed boy, 

Whom the rain and the wind purgeth, 
Whom the dawn and the day star urgeth. 

Open his ears to the psean which sounds through 
the forest when " the grand old harper smites his 
thunder harp of pines." Open his soul not only to 
the influence of Xaturc, but also to the influence of 
Nature's interpreters, the poets. Read to him, from 
the Odyssey, of zEolus holding the winds in his 
cave; from the Iliad, of the great battle between 
the Eire-God and the Rivers, wherein the help of 
the wind gave victory to his ally; from the Vedic 
hymns of the fierce Maruts, " who toss the clouds 
across the singing sea, who shake the rocks and tear 
asunder the trees of the forest " ; and when at last 
his soul is ready for the message turn his thought 
both to the transcendent God who " clothes Himself 
with light as with a garment, and walks upon the 
wings of the wind," and to that immanent spirit 
which, like the wind, " bloweth where it listeth." 
Then shall he understand the presentiments which 



FROM WIND TO SPIRIT. 89 

now liaimt liis dreaming sonl, and wide awake look 
into tlie open eyes of Truth.* 

If I have succeeded in suggesting to your mind 
tlie thoughts which Froebel's "Wind Song wakens 
in my own you will now be ready to recognize the 
truth that " the union of the one and the many is 
an everlasting quality in thought itself which never 
grows old in us." Keason is itself a unity in mani- 
foldness, hence it can never be satisfied save as it 
reduces the manifold to unity. The wonder of the 
child over the many objects moved by the wind is 
but an adumbration of the wrestling of mature 
thought with all forms of the manifold. It was be- 
cause it proved that each thing in the universe is 
relative to every other, and hence that the universe 

* I do not know whether I have made myself clear, but my 
general thought is that with little children we should limit 
our effort to bringing them in contact with the actual expe- 
riences out of which the race through analogy evolved its in- 
sights. Froebel suggests in his picture that they should 
notice the different things the wind does. As they grow 
older they should be led to notice the differences between still 
air, the gentle breeze, the brisk wind, the gust, the tornado. 
They should also distinguish the different sounds made by the 
wind — its whispers, songs, sighs, moans, whistles, shrieks, roars. 
In a word, they should be impressed with all its actual activi- 
ties, and left to themselves to make out its spiritual analogies. 
To give them the spiritual meaning is simply to thwart the 
whole natural process of development. 



90 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

is one, tliat Newton's tlioiiglit of gravitation was 
epoch-making in science. It was because it pic- 
tured the world " as a whole, moved and animated 
by internal forces," that Humboldt's Cosmos mer- 
ited and won its great celebrity. It was the convic- 
tion that every creature is " a note in the great har- 
mony which must be studied in the whole," which 
inspired Goethe's search for the intermaxillary 
bone. It was his poetic and philosophic craving to 
reduce diversities to unity which impelled him to 
botanical research, and led to the discovery of the 
metamorphosis of plants. It is because it endows 
all objects in time with the unity which gravitation 
gives to all objects in space, that the theory of evo- 
lution has achieved its unparalleled triumph. To 
solve the problem of the many and the one is the 
sole passion of thought, and in its ever-widening 
syntheses we recognize the gathering force of that 
finally resistless current with which the mind 
sweeps out upon the world. 



LETTER lY. 

MAKING BY UNMAKING. 

Oh, have you thought out all it means 

When baby comes to know 
Just this—" My bowl is empty now ; 

'Twas full a while ago ? " 

Only to soul life is it given 

To own the hour that's fled, 
Blest token that we most shall live 

When men shall call us dead. 

Henrietta E. Eliot. 

ALL GONE! 

All gone ! the supper's gone ! 
White bread and milk so sweet, 
For baby dear to eat. 

All gone ! the supper's gone ! 
Where did baby's supper go? 
Tongue, you had a share, I know. 
Little mouth, with open lips. 
Through your rosy gate it slips. 
Little throat, you know full well 
Where it went, if you would tell. 
Little hands, grow strong ; 
Little legs, grow long ; 
Little cheeks, grow red : 
You have all been fed. 

Emily Huntingtox Millek. 
91 







93 



MAKING BY UNMAKING, 93 

Dear : Witliin the past week I have been 

reading Professor Preyer's book, The Mind of the 
Child, and, perhaps because my thought has also 
been dwelling much on the All-Gone Song I have 
been forcibly struck by the many observations prov- 
ing that the first general concept attained by his boy 
was that of change in its two forms of ceasing to 
be and coming to be. It has also interested me 
to notice that the recognition of ceasing or vanish- 
ing preceded by nine months that of beginning or 
appearing. "While still unable to articulate any 
words other than the primitive syllables ma-ma, 
pa-pa, at-ta, little Axel formed the habit of saying 
atta when carried from the house for his daily out- 
ing. In his eleventh month he uttered the same 
word when the light of a lamp was dimmed. Later 
he whispered atta when a face was hidden, a fan 
closed, and a glass emptied of its contents. From 
these examples of its use it is evident that the word 
meant to him " gone, all gone," while from the fact 
that it was generally whispered it seems fair to infer 
that some sense of mystery, and some feeling of 
awe, attended this recognition of disappearance. 
Finally, the feeling of awe was heightened into 
visible terror during a railway journey, and the 



94 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

child repeated atta again and again as lie gazed 
from tlie car window upon the ever-vanishing land- 
scape.* 

Doubtless every thoughtful mother can recall 
experiences verifying the observations of Professor 
Preyer.f Doubtless, too, every mother tries to put 
into words and action something of what she feels 



* " The only word that is unquestionably used to denote a 
class of perceptions is still atta, ha-atta, which during the fol- 
lowing month also is uttered softly, for the most part on go- 
ing oiit, and which signifies away or gone. Beyond this no 
syllable can be named that marked the dawn of mental in- 
dependence, none that testified to the voluntary use of 
articulate sounds for the purpose of announcing perceptions." 
— Development of the Intellect, p. 122. Record of fifteenth 
month. 

" No second conoept is proved with certainty to be asso- 
ciated with a definite sound untd the twentieth month, when 
da or nda was frequently uttered in a lively manner and with 
a peculiarly demonstrative accent on the siulden appearance 
of a new object in the field of vision." — Development of the 
Intellect, p. 138. 

f The little girl I studied used as her first word All-gone 
in a highly generalized sense. She said it when an object was 
put out of sight ; when one was denied her ; when she saw an 
object that had been denied her; when she swallowed a mouth- 
ful of food: when she slipped back, failing to climb a step; 
when she had tried to attract some one's attention and failed ; 
when a person left the room ; when a door blew to ; when a 
wagon drove away ; when a person passed l)y, or a wagon ap- 
proached ; when she wished to go out herself {First Two Years 
of the C^?7d).— MiLLicENT W. Shinn. 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 95 

to be struggling in her child's mind. " All gone," 
she exclaims, smiling and throwing out her arms in 
explanatory gesture as babv gazes perplexed into 
his empty cup. '' xHl-gone, light," she repeats, when 
the candle is borne out of sight. " Bye-bye, papa," 
she calls, throwing a kiss as the father disap- 
pears from the nursery, and " bye-bye, pussie, 
bye-bye, birdie, bye-bye, ball," she says, and 
teaches her baby to say as one of these well- 
known objects runs, flies, or rolls out of the field 
of his vision. 

It must, however, be confessed that in this 
case the deed of the mother is hardly an adequate 
response to the hint thrown out by the child. Con- 
fronted by vanishing objects he shows perplexity, 
wonder, and fear. Evidently his mind is grappling 
with a problem. Something has gone ! Where has 
it gone? Why has it gone? Will it come back? 
Such are the questions stirring darkly within him, 
and we only need to put them into words to realize 
that the infant soul is having its first w^restle with 
an enigma which has allured and tortured the 
mind of man upon every plane of historic develop- 
ment. 

Were it not that familiarity with change dead- 



96 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

ens our sense of its mystery, we should meet the 
child's wonder with a more comprehending sym- 
pathy. Think of fleeting days, of changing seasons, 
of passing years! Behold in the heavens the set- 
ting sun, the waning moon, the vanishing stars! 
Let your imagination wander over the face of the 
earth until you feel the meaning of rushing rivers 
and ebbing tides, of fading flowers and falling 
leaves, of withering plants and dying animals. 
Consider how the mother vanishes from her child, 
the child from its mother, husband from wife, and 
friend from friend. When your heart has dwelt 
upon these things until you begin to realize what it 
means to be the denizen of a world which is forever 
fleeing from itself, and Avhose air is full of " fare- 
wells to the dying and mournings for the dead," 
stretch your thought, and from these commonplaces 
of change pass to its wider workings. Kemind 
yourself that the earth was once a ball of vapor 
and afterward a fiery sun, while now she hastens 
toward the time when, like the moon, she will be 
cold and dead. Kecall her geologic changes, her 
sunken continents, her vanished oceans, her extinct 
fauna and flora, the primitive men who roved 
through her ancient forests and died leaving no 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 97 

sign. Remember the great historic nations which 
have been and are not. Then once more expand 
your thought and try to realize that our planet is 
but one of an infinite number of worlds whose life 
process is presumably the same, and that, as a 
whole, the history of the universe is that of matter 
diffused through space and aggregated into revolv- 
ing spheres only to be after some brief span of life 
again diffused. 

Why is Turner the greatest painter of i!^ature? 
Is it not because he paints a dissolving appearance? 
" Even while you look at the landscape," say his 
great pictures, " it is passing away." Piety and 
poetry speak in similar strain. " The heavens wax 
old as a garment, and as a vesture shall they be 
changed." " The great globe shall dissolve, and 
like an insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a 
wrack behind." " I^ature is giddy with motion, 
and sun, moon, man undulate and stream." In the 
alembic of thought all " things that be " melt to 
" things that seem," and solid Nature dissolves into 
" one fast-flowing energy," " one rushing meta- 
morphosis." 

"When you begin to feel as little Axel felt in 
presence of the flying landscape, consider with what 



98 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

thoughts you seek to reassure your quaking heart. 
Do you not remind yourself that the sinking lights 
in the heaven will rise again, that the stream which 
rushes to the sea is but returning to its source, that 
the fading flower carries in its heart the seed whence 
new flowers shall be born, that though individual 
plants and animals die, their species persist? Ris- 
ing to higher levels of thought, do you not declare 
that extinct fauna and flora are explained when we 
contemplate Nature as a whole and read her evolu- 
tionary history; that no great nation perishes un- 
less the World-Sj)irit transcends the idea it em- 
bodies; that death is in reality the true birth of the 
spirit, and that though our earth shall one day re- 
turn to star dust it will not be until she has fulfilled 
her destiny, and nurtured countless millions of im- 
mortal souls. Summing up these separate reassur- 
ances, is it not clear that you explain to yourself the 
phenomena of change by declaring that they imply 
unrealized possibility, and that in all seemingly 
destructive activities you recognize the segments 
and arcs of great circular, spiral, and vortical pro- 
cesses? 

Now, just as you explain change to yourself, 
you must explain it to your boy if you would help 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 99 

him to conquer and keep liis poise of mind. Your 
explanations must, however, be limited to those 
infinitesimal circles of change which fall within the 
range of his minute experience. Froebel's All- 
Gone Plaj shows you the ideal mother fulfilling 
this double requirement. Baby's supper is all gone ! 
Where did it go? Little lips, little tongue, little 
throat, you can tell. Will it come back? Yes, for 
see, baby's legs are getting long, and his cheeks 
rosy. Vaguely at first, but with ever-increasing 
clearness the child learns to connect his food with 
his bodily health and growth, and with this syn- 
thesis makes perhaps his first solution of the enigma 
of change. 

In the account of her girlhood days at Keilhau, 
Frau Schrader confesses that some of Froebel's 
plays seemed to her ridiculous, and that she found 
his idea that men might be made noble by playing 
such games narrow, limited, and unnatural. Every 
thoughtful kindergartner has probably been forced 
to combat a similar doubt both in herself and others. 
^No one can get rid of it without the insight that 
each little play is merely the concrete example of a 
general method of procedure, and the point of de- 
parture for a cumulative series of experiences. The 



100 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

really wonderful thing about Froebel is liis acumen 
in discerning the nuclei of development, and his 
power of connecting them with the ideals which 
are at once their impulsion and their goal. What 
he says to the mother in each of his little plays is: 
Learn from what you do in this given instance 
how to act in all similar instances. What he says 
in the All-Gone Song is: Learn from the synthesis 
we have made between baby's vanishing supper and 
his rosy cheeks how to explain all seemingly de- 
structive processes. 

If, therefore, we aspire to be intelligent dis- 
ciples of the prophet of childhood, we shall seize 
upon every opportunity of calling attention to the 
rhythmic movement through which change negates 
itself. We shall connect the sunset with the sunrise, 
point out the recurrent phases of the moon, teach 
children to recognize the brightest stars and the 
most striking constellations, and to watch for their 
disappearance and return. We shall call attention 
to the flight of migratory birds, and to their joyous 
reappearance. We shall show the links which bind 
the separate seasons into a circular chain of activity. 
We shall suggest that all the metamorphoses of 
plant life find their consummation in reproducing 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 101 

the seed from whicli tliey started. We shall stir 
childish imagination with the mysterious transfor- 
mations of the caterpillar into chrysalis and butter- 
fly. We shall make much of family birthdays and 
national anniversaries, and avail ourselves of the 
sweet influence of our great church festivals upon 
the development of religious emotion and aspiration. 
In a word, let the idea of the All-Gone Song be- 
come really alive in our minds, and it will impel us 
daily to some sympathetic suggestion or interpreta- 
tion of which otherwise we might never have 
dreamed. 

The choice of baby's vanishing supper as a typ- 
ical illustration of the fact of change is a happy one, 
because in it the child is himself the change pro- 
ducer. He unmakes his food in order to make his 
body. Emerson has described the process of assimi- 
lation as a physical effort to make over the world 
into the image of the self. " The snake converts 
whatever food the meadow yields into snake, the 
fox into fox, and Peter and John are busy working 
up all existence into Peter and John." The ideal 
which this effort implies can, however, not be real- 
ized upon the physical plane, and the act of assimi- 
lation points upward to man's spiritual activity in 



102 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

subduing, transforming, and idealizing ISTature. 
Realizing this fact do yoa not begin to see the 
destructiveness of little children in a new light? 
Why do they empty drawers, tear paper, break their 
toys? Are they, too, trying to stamp themselves 
upon their environment? Must they, too, unmake 
in order to remake? And above all, is it your duty 
to see to it that the effort of the self to produce its 
image be not thwarted by the lack of material sim- 
ple enough to lend itself readily to the transforming 
and creative impulse? 

You must often have watched little children at 
play on the seashore, and you know that for a time 
they are content simply to fill little pails with sand, 
which they immediately pour out. Later, they 
make huts, dig wells, excavate tunnels, lay out 
gardens, and when several of them play together, 
whole villages spring up under their combined 
effort. Change making without aim is transfigured 
into creation, and individual creativeness increased 
by social combination. From hints like these Froe- 
bel was led to the production of the kindergar- 
ten gifts, and to use them so that they may abet 
the activity of the child in these several stages of 
development is to use them in his spirit. 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. ' 103 

So much for the All-Gone Song. Xow for the 
pictnre. You will notice that it is divided into two 
parts. In the foreground of the low^er division 
mother and child sit at a table on which stands a 
cup from which the child has just been fed. In 
front of the table a dog who has greedily devoured 
his food looks in his dish for more. Back of the 
mother a thirsty boy asks water of his sister, wdio 
for an answer holds up an empty glass. As he 
looks at the glass sly puss creeps up behind him 
and steals his slice of buttered bread. AVhen 
he shall turn to get his bread he will find it " all 
gone." 

Suspended from the ceiling hangs a cage, and 
on tiptoe beside it a little girl stands ready to give 
her canary fresh seed. As she opens the door she 
turns her head just for a second to see what her 
sister is doing, and lo! when she looks again at the 
cage she will find her bird flown. Her little brother 
tries to comfort her. " Come with me, sister," he 
says, " for out in the field I know a tree in which 
there is a nest full of birds." 

The upper part of the picture shows us the chil- 
dren arrived at the field. The older boy has 
climbed the tree to get the nest. The other children 



104 ■ LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

are so absorbed in watebiiig bim tbat not one of 
them notices tbe dog who has followed tliem to tlie 
field, and now stands qnietly eating tlie bread tbe 
younger boy holds in his hand. When the little 
fellow turns round he too will find his bread — all 
gone. The elder brother has reached the nest. But 
what does he see? The nest is empty; the birds 
have all flown away. One little bird, however, 
flutters to the ground. " I shall have you, at any 
rate," says the younger boy, throwing his hat over 
it. " How glad I shall be to give you to my sister. 
AVait here, little bird, under my hat, until I pick 
the beautiful raspberries growing on this bush. 
How good they will taste ! " But a frolicsome breeze 
blows over the hat, away flies the bird, and the boy 
when he returns from the raspberry bush will find 
his bird flown. 

Froebel's explanation of this picture shows that 
by typical illustrations of inattention, inconsiderate- 
ness, want of forethought, and lack of self-restraint 
he is seeking to awaken the ideals which these ten- 
dencies contradict. In other words, he is beginning 
the moral education of the child by attacking the 
faults into which all children are betrayed. He 
knows that higher virtues imply lower ones, and 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 105 

that the attempt to develop the higher before the 
lower is the parent of sham and hypocrisy. He 
knows that until we win inner collectedness there is 
no possibility of any real spiritual development, 
that all good is conquered evil, and all character 
formed by a process of overcoming. Therefore he 
escapes the too common error of trying to build 
character by beginning with the roof instead of the 
foiindations. 

For a long time I was puzzled by the excursion 
to the field and the attempt to rob the bird's nest, 
and it seemed to me that the condemnation of this 
proceeding was by no means sufficiently stringent. 
The following passage from the Education of Man 
cleared my vision, and showed me that it was be- 
cause Froebel understood the child that he did not 
exaggerate his offense: 

" Another source of many boyish faults lies in 
precipitation, carelessness, frivolity, and thought- 
lessness. The boy is apt to act in obedience to a 
possibly praiseworthy impulse that holds captive 
his mind and body ; but he has not yet experienced 
in his life the consequences of gratifying this par- 
ticular impulse, and it has, indeed, not even occurred 
to him to consider the consequences of the action. 



106 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

... A boy throws stones for a long time at tlie 
small window of a house near by, trying very hard 
to hit it. He has no idea, nor does he realize that, 
if a stone strikes the window, the latter must neces- 
sarily break. At last a stone hits the window, the 
window breaks, and the amazed boy stands rooted 
to the spot. 

" Again, another boy, by no means malicious, 
but, on the contrary, very good natured and fond of 
pigeons, aimed at his neighbor's beautiful pigeon 
on the roof, with perfect delight and an intense de- 
sire to hit his mark. lie did not consider that if 
the bullet should hit the mark the pigeon would 
be killed, and still less that this pigeon might be 
the mother of young ones needing her care. He 
fired, the bullet struck, the pigeon fell, a beautiful 
pair of pigeons were separated, and a number of un- 
fledged young ones lost the mother who had fed 
and warmed them. 

" It is certainly a very great truth — and failure 
to appreciate it does daily great harm — that it gen- 
erally is some other human being, not unfrequently 
the educator himself, that first makes the child or 
the boy bad. This is accomplished by attributing 
evil — or at least wrong — motives to all that the 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 107 

child or boy does from ignorance, precipitation, or 
even from a keen and praiseworthy sense of right 
or wrong." * 

Interpreting the attempt to rob the bird's nest 
in the light of these illustrations, is it not clear that 
Froebel recognized as its inspiration the boy's kind- 
ly imjDulse to make good to his sister the loss of 
her canary, while, on the other hand, by saving 
the nestlings and suggesting their right to their 
home and their freedom, he attacks the heedless- 
ness which might so easily harden into wanton 
cruelty? 

Test this interpretation the next time you show 
Harold the All-Gone picture. Say to him : " It 
was kind of the little brother to want to give his 
sister another bird, but he should have thought how 
the poor little bird would miss its home and its 
mother, and how the mother would grieve for her 
nestling." On the other hand, learn from this illu- 
minating example how important it is to overcome 
the tendency to give pleasure at no cost to one's 
self, and without considering the cost to others. 
Train Harold to recognize that before he permits 
himself to give he must consider whether what he 

* Education of Man, Hailraann's translation, pp. 123, 124. 
9 



108 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

is giving is liis own. Otlierwise lie may fall into 
the habit of preying npon the time, strength, and 
jjossessions of others in order to gratify alike his 
selfish and his generous whims, and in the latter 
case even plume himself on his exceptional kindli- 
ness. 

Buddha felt so sorry for the hungry tiger that 
he offered himself as its supper. This was the 
reductio ad dbsurdum of self-sacrifice. But it is 
worse to gratify your momentary sympathy with 
the tiger by throwing him your neighbor or your 
friend. 

Are you asking what possible connection there 
can be between these moral lessons and baby's van- 
ishing supper? Some tie must bind them together, 
or our picture is no picture at all. A true picture 
is a unity in the manifold. Some one idea is ex- 
pressed in all of its different objects, and each ob- 
ject or group of objects jDresents this idea from a 
different point of view. Obviously the All-Gone 
picture presents the general fact of disappearance. 
The supper, the canary, the nestlings, the slice of 
bread all vanish away. This merely superficial con- 
nection, however, leaves us dissatisfied, and we 
seek a deeper unity in the thought of return or re- 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 109 

action. The cliild's supper returns, and so does his 
deed. The return of the one has a positive, the re- 
turn of the other a negative, outcome. Baby's bread 
and milk is transmuted into rosy cheeks and sturdy 
limbs. Heedlessness and want of consideration de- 
stroy the continuity of experience, and cause each 
new moment of time to eat up its predecessor. The 
ability to recognize change enables the child to 
observe the recoil of his deeds, and thus makes pos- 
sible a process of self-changing through which a 
merely animal type of existence is transfigured into 
truly human living. The child unmakes his food 
to make his body. He unmakes in order to remake 
his environment. He must unmake in order to 
make himself. 

The activities of sense, the power of motion, 
the rudimentary impulses of sympathy, the faculty 
of imitation, the young child shares with young 
animals. With the recognition of change he parts 
company from the brute, and enters upon his dis- 
tinctive career as a human being. The conscious- 
ness of change presupposes an act of comparison. 
Something which was is contrasted with something 
that is. Such comparison implies that a past mo- 
ment is held in mind, and such holding of a van- 



110 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

ished moment shows that the child is no longer a 
creature of mere sensation, who, heedless of his 
ceaseless transit, is whirled along the rushing stream 
of Time. He has climbed the banks of the Time 
river and, stationary himself, watches its ever-flow- 
ing currents. Thenceforward he need never fear 
being drowned in its waves. 

But though the consciousness of change assures 
its possessor of endless life, it does not free him 
from temporal life. Shakespeare has described ap- 
petite, or merely natural impulse, as a universal wolf, 
which, making, perforce, a universal prey, at last 
eats up itself. When each successive moment de- 
vours the deed of the preceding moment life is for- 
ever vanishing and beginning anew, and though it 
should persist forever it would remain forever 
finite and temporal. It is only as we learn to do 
deeds, each of which re-enforces all the others and 
is in turn re-enforced by them that mere endlessness 
is transfigured into eternal life. The recognition of 
change gives the point of departure for the con- 
version of endlessness into eternity. For from con- 
trast between what was and what is, the mind, under 
the impetus of the idea of cause, advances to their 
connection, and thus becomes conscious of the cir- 



MAKING BY UNMAKINa. m 

cular sweep of its own energies. Observing the re- 
sults of his deeds, the child begins to define their 
nature. Defining their nature, he discriminates 
good from evil and generates ideals. Generating 
ideals he becomes morally self-directing, and thus 
frees his soul from external seduction, and fortifies 
it against external attack. 

There are three kinds of change. The first is 
that which is wholly produced by outside influence. 
Rocks are worn away by water; iron is corroded by 
air; forests are destroyed by fire; water is frozen 
by cold and converted into vapor by heat. In the 
second form of change there is both outside influ- 
ence and self-determination. To this type belong 
the vital processes of nutrition, respiration, and 
reproduction, the adaptive modification to environ- 
ment, by which all existing species of plants 
and animals have been produced, and that progres- 
sive transformation of Nature through which it be- 
comes the image and revelation of human selfhood. 
In the third form of change external influence van- 
ishes, and the process is self-produced and self-sus- 
tained. The self -changing being creates its own en- 
vironment, furnishes its own stimulations, acts 
upon itself as object, and transforms itself as result. 



112 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

This type of change is realized through the ascent 
of thought to the contemplation of causal energies, 
and in the self-determination of the will through 
altruistic ideals. To attain the stadium of self- 
change is to become free and immortal — free be- 
cause emancipated from external coercion and se- 
duction, immortal because possessing the power of 
realizing all potentialities and transcending all de- 
fects. 

We are becoming familiar with the idea that 
the condition of the young child presents many 
analogies to that of the hypnotic patient, and that 
as the latter responds to the suggestions of the 
operator, so the former responds to the suggestions 
of his environment. Professor Baldwin tested the 
regularity of the operation of suggestion by arrang- 
ing attractive objects about a room in such a way 
that only after reaching one could his little daugh- 
ter see the next. He found her, of course, the vic- 
tim of this device, and she rushed with avidity from 
one object to another.* It is, however, important 
to remember that all children do not respond in the 
same manner to the same suggestion. Approach 
your face to one baby and you get a scratch, ap- 

* Mental Development, James Mark Baldwin, p. 385. 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 113 

proacli it to another and you receive a caress.* 
Hold up before one cliild a number of attractive 
objects, and his mind is paralyzed by colliding de- 
sires. Hold the same objects before a different 
child and he immediately seizes one and neglects 
all the rest. The individuality of each child influ- 
ences the form of his reaction to external stimuli, 
or, differently stated, the native bias of tempera- 
ment acts as an unconscious motive in determining 
the choice. Moral life begins when conscious mo- 
tives take the place of blind impulsion. Where 
these are lacking there is self-determination in the 
forms of impulse and desire. Where they are pres- 
ent there is self-determination in its highest potency 
as free will. 

Even while the child is still borne along by the 
current of mere natural impulse the mother may do 
much to help or hinder his moral development. By 
appealing to activity, sympathy, kindness, generos- 
ity she may increase the energy of these elemental 
forces; by appealing to selfishness and vanity she 
may augment the power of these despotic passions. 

* " Caligula recognized the legitimacy of his daughter be- 
cause of the early brutality with which she attacked the eyes 
and cheeks of other infants who were presented to her as play- 
fellows." — De Quincy's Cfesars, p. 86. 



114 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

But tlie highest privilege of motherhood is to aid 
the child to generate conscious ideals and win him 
to obey them. The means of realizing this double 
purpose are worthy examples, well-considered ap- 
proval, reproof, and punishment; the direction of 
the child's observation to the recoil of his deeds; 
stories, songs, poems, and pictures, j)ortraying 
right and wrong actions belonging to the level of 
consciousness he has attained. 

Several cautions are necessary. The first is that 
in judging the actions of children we must be care- 
ful to study their motives, and avoid the too com- 
mon error of reading into them our own stronger and 
more conscious feelings. Little children are neither 
so bad nor so good as we think them when we ex- 
plain them by ourselves. Much of the injustice 
done them arises from imputing to them deliber- 
ately evil intentions impossible in a stage of devel- 
opment whose characteristic mark is simple inconti- 
nence, while conversely our undue praise of their 
virtue arises from transferring to them by analogy 
our own spiritual struggles and victories. The sec- 
ond caution is that since the child can appreciate 
only the consequences which follow close upon the 
heels of action he must be incited to effort and self- 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 115 

control, not by the remote but by the immediate 
fruits of his deeds. Our moral appeals are often 
fruitless just because we are blind to this truth, and 
instead of calling attention to near results threaten 
the child with that distant and to him indifferent 
future when he shall be a man, or ajDpeal to him by 
motives borrowed from the more remote and hence 
less potent hereafter of death. Finally, since good 
is conquered evil, and we learn what is right by 
finding out what is wrong, it is of prime importance 
to hold up to imagination examples of deeds to be 
shunned, and this is the reason why Froebel in the 
All-Gone picture shows the outcome of those impul- 
sive errors into which little children are most prone 
to fall. In the commentary on Falling Falling, in 
the pictures and commentaries relating to the 
Fishes and the Light Bird, in the Broken Window, 
the Shadow Songs, the Knights and the Bad Child, 
he likewise portrays negative deeds, and shows their 
results. That in many songs and pictures he pre- 
sents actions to be emulated goes without saying. 
Like our traditional tales where the virtues of the 
hero or heroine are thro^vn into relief by contrast 
with a bad brother or sister, like the Bible stories 
of Cain and Abel, ISToah and the wicked world. 



116 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

Esau and Jacob, Josei^li and liis brethren, David 
and Saul; like the revelation of good in Dante's 
Purgatory through positive and negative examples, 
the Mother-Play allures the heart by the beauty 
of the ideal, and defines this ideal by picturing the 
outcome of deeds which contradict it. 

One of the commonest mistakes in education is 
the presentation of ideals for which the mind is 
not prepared. Whenever this is done it either con- 
fuses the child's intellect, leaves him indifferent, 
arouses his antagonism, or betrays him into hypoc- 
risy. Rousseau tells a good story of a little boy 
whom he heard glibly relating the celebrated anec- 
dote of Alexander the Great and his trusted physi- 
cian. The latter had prescribed for the king a 
medicinal draught. Alexander was told that it was 
poisoned. But he had reason to trust the character 
of his physician, so he quietly told the latter what 
he had heard, and then drank the medicine. To 
understand the point of this story it is necessary to 
know how many dangers beset one who wears a 
crown; how discerning must be the mind of him 
who, surrounded by false and faithless men, clearly 
recognizes those who may be trusted; and how 
heroic is the heart which dares to stake life rather 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 117 

tlian to doubt a proven character. Xaturallj a 
young child can appreciate neither such dangers, 
such discernment, nor such heroism; and there- 
fore when Rousseau, who suspected that he had 
been listening to a parrot recitation, questioned 
the narrator he found that the boy, who had 
himself recently been forced to take a nauseous 
draught, was simply admiring Alexander for drink- 
ing with calmness what must have had a very 
bad taste. 

"Why is Hamlet the Sphinx * of literature ? Is 
it not because so few people know the morbid in- 
trospection, the too curious consideration which 
paralyzes the will? Literature is purgatorial when 
it reveals both the motive and the outcome of deed. 
We understand the revelation only in so far as we 
find something analogous to it in our own con- 
sciousness. I am sure that many stories we tell 
children are not only valueless but pernicious, be- 
cause the deeds portrayed remain opaque to imag- 
ination, and I am no less sure that one reason we 
tell such stories is because we do not consider that 
good is conquered evil, and that the only ideals 
the young child can understand are those which 
* See Mr. D. J. Snider's Shakespearean Drama. 



118 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

point to conquest of tlie faults into which he is 
constantly betrayed. If you will remember this 
you will know how to save Harold from staggering 
about in garments of thought which fit his mind 
about as the trousers and coats of his long-legged, 
broad-chested father would fit his little body. 

The Chinese are said to have the golden rule in 
a negative form. The Hindoo knows there is a 
contradiction between his natural and ideal self, 
but has never been able to make a positive solution 
of the problem which such a contradiction involves. 
The ten commandments are specific and prohibitory; 
the Christian law of love is universal and afiirma- 
tory. The educational discipline of many centuries 
was required to bridge the gulf between the two 
revelations. Genetically " Thou shalt not " ante- 
dates " Thou shalt," and though evil can only be 
defined as the negative of good, it is none the less 
true that good arises by the process of overcoming 
evil. Looking at evil " under the form of eternity," 
we may confidently repeat the afiirmation of St. 
Augustine : " I inquired what iniquity was and 
found it no substance, but perversion of the will 
from the best and highest good." Looking at good 
under the form of time we are forced to admit its 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 119 

evolution from evil, and to realize tliat both for tlie 
individual and the race the making of the ideal in- 
volves the unmaking of the natural self. 

We have ceased to talk of original sin, but we 
reaffirm the thought which inspired that formula 
in the statement that " man must throw off his 
brute inheritance." FroebeFs wording of this in- 
sight is that man is born the child of Xature, but is 
destined to become the child of God. Goethe has 
rekindled its light in many minds by his declara- 
tion that " it is only with renunciation that life, 
properly speaking, can be said to begin." The mys- 
tic teaches the same truth when he bids us remem- 
ber that we must " die to live," and philosophy 
defines its complete implication in the profound 
paradox that the negative must negate itself. 
Under all forms of statement the one great 
idea is that self-making is self-changing, and 
that it is only by annihilating self that we 
achieve selfhood. 

I wonder if, when as a child you listened to the 
story of Jacob and Esau, you felt as I did. How I 
despised Jacob for his timidity, his bargaining, his 
deceit! How my heart went out to the gener- 
ous, impulsive, affectionate Esau! How unjust it 



120 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

seemed to me tliat his crafty supplanter sliould be 
preferred as father of the people of God. It has 
taken long years of experience to reconcile me to 
Jacob. Slowly I came to see that from the begin- 
ning he showed a susceptibility to the ideal which 
Esau wholly lacked. I began to appreciate his rev- 
erence for the despised birthright. I admitted 
that a man who could serve fourteen years to gain 
the woman he loved deserved respect. I recognized 
in all the details of his life the merit of resolute 
and unbending purpose. I beheld the gradual up- 
lifting of his aims, the gradual ennobling of his en- 
deavor. I entered into the meaning of that night 
of agony wherein he wrestled with an adversary 
whose name he knew not, and won his own new 
name of Israel, the prince of God. I confessed that 
his was the triumph of one who overcomes, and re- 
luctantly admitted that his more attractive brother 
remained forever the child of impulse, one " who 
did eat and drink, rose up and went his way." 
Finally I recognized in history the vindication of 
the divine choice. In the wrathful monarch who 
slew the babes of Bethlehem and in the heartless 
voluptuary who as the reward of a seductive dance 
gave the head of a prophet, I learned to condemn 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 121 

their wavering, fickle, and unruly progenitor, while 
my heart did tardy justice to the wrestling and pre- 
vailing Jacob as I realized that from the race who 
were called by his name, and who perpetuated his 
character, there sprang in the fullness of time that 
mighty One who, having overcome the world and 
the flesh, death and the grave, shall reign forever 
king of kings and lord of lords. 

Have I wandered far from the All-Gone pic- 
ture? To me it does not seem so, for in its gentle 
incitement to consideration and self-restraint I rec- 
ognize that Froebel is guiding the child's first 
feeble steps upon the steep and narrow path which 
mounts toward the ideal I have been describing. 
Our " sugar-plum " and " flower-pot " education, 
on the contrary, beguiles him to self-indulgence, 
and creates in him the vicious expectation of success 
without effort, love without merit, and character 
without conquest. 

Every thoughtful mother must consciously ask 
two questions: What is the universal law of de- 
velopment, and what is its goal? To these ques- 
tions the answers are written in characters which 
he who runs may read. What mean the " struggle 
for life," and the " survival of the fittest " ? 



122 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

What means that nobler struggle for tlie life 
of others shown in the care of the plant for its 
seed, the bird for her nestlings, the mammalian 
mother for her suckling? What mean the lov- 
ing sacrifices of human parents, the devotion 
of patriots, the self -surrender of heroes, the 
voluntary martyrdom of saints? Dare we hesi- 
tate to draw the inevitable conclusion that crea- 
tion is a via dolorosa upon whose summit 
stands the cross ? " If thou be the son of God 
save thyself and come down from the cross! " 
Ah, if we but knew it, could we but realize 
it, that is just the one thing the son of God may 
never do. 

And now, dear mother of my little godson, do 
you trust me enough, do you love me enough 
to accept at my hands the wounds of a friend? 
May I say to you with perfect frankness that 
in the education of your older children you 
seem to me to have violated the principle sug- 
gested in the All-Gone picture and commentary. 
I have often wondered why you who have 
so strenuously wrought, so triumphantly over- 
come, should fail to incite your children to noble 
warfare. Does your too sanguine love blind you to 



MAKING BY UXMAKIXG. 123 

tlie dangers wliicli beset tlieir gifted, sympatlietic, 
attractive, yet wayward and pleasnre-loving na- 
tures? Is it that you have thought it sufficient to 
hold up general ideals of conduct and trust to the 
" spontaneous spring of the soul toward truth " for 
the reaction of such ideals ui^on the formation of 
character? May it be that your over-sensitive feel- 
ing of personal accountability betrays you into 
assuming resf)onsibilities not your own, that there- 
fore you seek to shield your children rather than to 
arm them, and that in your fear of arousing antag- 
onism you fall at times into an unworthy ac- 
quiescence? Or, is it possible that you feel the 
allurement of the higher life, but not its compul- 
sion; that you actually do not know that sun and 
moon are set in array against wayward caprice; 
that the stars in their courses fight against self-in- 
dulgence, that a militant cosmos defends its own 
ideal of rational freedom? I ask these questions, 
but I can not answer them. I only know that 
while you have chosen for yourself the life of con- 
quest you have not seemed to expect it of your chil- 
dren. Begin to do so, and with your Benjamin 
begin so early that you may avoid for him the 

tragic crises from which it may be you can not 
10 



12i LETTEKS TO A MOTHER. 

now save his older brothers and sisters. Do not 
be discouraged by past mistakes, but set your- 
self the valiant task of undoing their results. 
Claim for your loved ones as for yourself the 
ceaseless strife and the two-edged sword, the 
noble failure which transcends all petty successes, 
the " divine discontent " sweeter far than all fi- 
nite joys. 

The goal of all . spiritual activity is its return 
upon a higher plane to its point of departure. The 
infant lives only in the vanishing moment. Win- 
ning the final triumph of character he lives again in 
the moment, but he freights the moment with eter- 
nity. 

The madness which mortgages the whole of life 
to its fleeting moments, and scoffs at inevitable con- 
sequences in the violence and recklessness of its de- 
sires is portrayed in the legend of Faust. But a 
world-poet has transfigured the myth by giving it 
a different ending. Itself immortal and divine, the 
soul of man can never find satisfaction in the finite 
and ephemeral. Goaded by aspiration it must dis- 
dain all petty joys, and the only moment to which 
it can say. Ah, still delay, thou art so fair, is the 
moment of love, of service, and of sacrifice, into 



MAKING BY UNMAKING. 125 

Avhicli is comjJresseJ eternal life. Over sueli a soul 
the spirit of evil, which is the spirit of finitiide, 
can have no lasting power, and in its noble un- 
rest we read the blessed promise of its final per- 
fection. 




. « 



LETTER V. 

heaven's first law. 

Oh, teacli your child that Order's law 

Is ever truly kind, 
And will his life to music set ; 
While those who this same law forget 

No rhythmic sweetness tind. 

The clock is not a master hard, 

Euling with iron hand ; 
It is a happy household sprite, 
Helping all things to move aright, 

With gentle guiding wand. 

Its quiet tick still seems to say, 

"Though time pass velvet shod. 
It guides the universal round 
Of worlds and souls — for it is found 

Deep in the thought of God ! ' ' 

IIenkietta K. Eliot. 

TICK! TACK! 

Swing, swong ! this is the way 
Goes the pendulum night and day. 
"Tick! tock! tick! tock ! " 
Never resting, says the clock. 

"Time for work and time for fun, 

Time to sleep when day is done. 
Tick ! tock ! " Hear the clock ! 
"Time to rest each little head ; 
Time the children were in bed." 

127 



128 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

Swing, swong ! sure and slow 
Goes the pendulum to and fro. 
"Tick! tock! tick! took! 
In the morning says the clock. 

" Time to wake from slumber sweet, 

Time to wash and time to eat. 
Tick! tock." Hear the clock, 
"Tick, tack, took ! " it cries, 
"Children, it is time to rise ! " 

Emily Huntixotox Millee. 



It was in the Eads kindergarten, one bright 
morning many years ago, that there came to me my 
first genuine insight into Froebel's Play of the 
Clock. At that time Mrs. Hubbard was director of 
the kindergarten, and her manner of playing Froe- 
bel's games always helped me to interpret them. I 
used to watch her very closely, for it occurred to 
me that from her intuitions might be deduced gen- 
eral principles which would be helpful to all kin- 
dergartners. She had so disciplined her body by 
suitable exercises that it w^as the pliant instrument 
of her will. Her voice and manner were quiet, and 
her whole personality suggested repose in the midst 
of energy. Her gestures were never vague and un- 
meaning, but really definitions of thought through 
movement. She never allowed a number of chil- 
dren to stand idle on the circle while a few played 
in the center, but invariably found some way of en- 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 129 

listing the activity of all in each game. Thus, if 
five or six children were flying birds, those on the 
circle became trees ; if the few were butterflies, the 
many were flowers; if the few were fishes, the 
many became a flowing stream or an undulating 
lake. But the feature, of what for want of a better 
term I must call her method, which most impressed 
me was her complete identification of the little 
players with the persons or objects whose activities 
they imitated. Were the children, for example, 
playing carpenters and playing carelessly, she 
would never say to them " You are not planing or 
sawing as the carpenter does," but " I am afraid 
I shall have to get better carpenters to build my 
house." Children who failed in the rhythmic 
swing of the arms and legs which represented the 
pendulums were clocks out of order and needing 
repair. Tiny tots who found the flying movement 
difiicult were consoled by the suggestion that of 
course baby birds couldn't fly so fast or so far as 
the mamma bird, but they mustn't mind, for their 
wings would soon be stronger. All who have 
watched the spontaneous play of little children 
know that its characteristic mark is precisely this 
merging of their own identity in the being of the 



130 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

object represented. Thus a little girl who was 
playing the part of a robin mother and tenderly 
feeding imaginary nestlings with imaginary worms 
became not only pale, but breathless and palpita- 
ting with terror at her own mother's rather 
thoughtless suggestion of an approaching cat. Xor 
was her equanimity restored until she had trans- 
formed the robin into a farmer who, as she eagerly 
explained, was not afraid of cats. 

But to return to the Clock Play. I had gone 
bright and early to the Eads kindergarten, for I 
wished to see the opening exercises, of which Froe- 
bel's game of the Tick-Tack w^as a daily feature. 
As I entered the room the children w^ere rising to 
play it. A moment later a little girl followed me, 
and seemed about to greet the director and children 
when the opening strains of the Tick-Tack melody 
transformed her into a clock. I looked around; 
there were no children in the room, nothing but 
animated clocks — arms, legs, bodies swaying to the 
rhythm of the song. They w^ere children again 
when the game was finished, but the spontaneous 
punctuality and exactness of all their work proved 
that they were children who had developed a clock 
consciousness. Then I said to myself, Froebel is 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 131 

right, and to imitate the activity of any object is 
to become yourself the object you imitate. 

In my letter on the Weathervane I tried to 
show you that imitation is the child's first way of 
getting back of phenomena to their causes, or, dif- 
ferently stated, his first way of explaining the world 
in which he finds himself. But this interpretation 
of environment is only one aspect of the function 
of imitation, and I want you now to consider its 
other aspect and to realize that it is by and through 
imitation that the child begins to create himself. 

Have you ever thought how strange it is that 
the baby knows himself first as an object like any 
other, calling himself as he calls other things by a 
particular name, tugging to pull off his leg as he 
pulls off his stocking? Have you realized that it is 
only in contrast with a plurality of objects that he 
discriminates himself as J, or universal subject, and 
" rounds into a separate mind ? " Have you ever 
pondered the fact that each new experience teaches 
us something about ourselves we did not know, that 
every natural scene, every human relationship, 
every book we read, every picture we see, every 
song we hear, reveals to us some power or some de- 
fect in ourselves? In a story whose name I have 



132 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

entirely forgotten, tlie heroine gives as her reason 
for wanting to travel that until she has seen the 
whole world there will be something about herself 
she does not know. This remark has mingled itself 
in my consciousness with Whitman's poem of the 
child who became the objects he looked upon,* 
with Mr. Alcott's orphic saying that man is omni- 
present and lies all about himself, and with the 
puzzling metaphysical statement that the world is 
mind turned inside out. The precipitate I get from 
this compound solution is that the contents of mind 

* There was a child went forth one day, 

And the first object that he looked upon, that object he be- 
came. 

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain 
part of the day, 

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years. 

The early lilacs became part of this child, 

And grass, and white and red morning glories, and white 
and red clover, and the song of the phcebe bird. 

And the apple trees covered with blossoms, and the fruit af- 
terward ; and woodberries and the commonest weeds 
by the road. 

And the schoolmistress that passed on her way to the school 
And the friendly boys that passed, and the quarrelsome boys, 
And the tidy and fresh-cheeked girls, and the barefoot ne- 
gro boy and girl, 
And all the changes of city and country wherever he went. 

Walt Whitman. 



RExWEN'S FIRST LAW. 133 

are ideas, and that could we turn mind inside out 
and, as it were, spill its contents without destroying 
their order, the result would be the display of all 
possible ideas as separate objects in an articulated 
system. Such an outpouring of the divine mind is 
the universe; only as he becomes its mirror does 
man have ideas of his own, and only as he possesses 
ideas does he achieve concrete individuality or true 
personality. Opposed to this true personality is the 
natural or abstract self which is simply a plastic 
energy molding experiences into a specific form. 
Obviously, therefore, the concrete individuality 
will be rich or poor in proportion to the range of 
experience, and it is literally true that until we 
know the universe we can neither be nor know our 
real selves. 

With insight into the truth that the progress 
of mind is from object to subject, from the world 
to the self, we get new light on the significance of 
imitation. The child makes himself into a weath- 
ervane, a clock, a bird. This means that he makes 
over these objects into himself. N"otice, moreover, 
that since he imitates the activities of these objects 
he defines and assimilates not their outer semblance, 
but their informing idea. Through imitation he 



134 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

penetrates from the sensuous fact to its producing 
energy, and produces in himself a reflection of this 
energy. Thus it is that by imitating the rhythmic 
utterance of the clock, and the rhythmic swing 
of the pendulum, he begins on the one hand to 
understand the nature of the clock as a measurer 
of time, and on the other to develop in himself 
those ideals of order and punctuality which are 
the soul's practical responses to time measure- 
ment. 

You must be getting tired of my repeated insist- 
ence upon the fact that the Mother-Play singles out 
for imitation objects and actions which have both 
an allurement for all children and a general edu- 
cative value. It is superfluous to give illustrations 
of the fascination of the clock, but you will learn 
much of the nature of mind by considering its 
source. This source is a life veiled in mystery, and 
expressing itself in rhythm. All mystery quickens 
the imagination; a rhythmic mystery stirs it pro- 
foundly because of " a certain remote kinship with 
the form o:^ our soul activity." To define the tie 
between rhythm and sjDiritual activity will be to 
understand the allurement of the clock, but be- 
fore attempting such a definition I want to sug- 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 135 

gest to you a sufficient number of related facts 
to awaken a premonition of the reason imbedded 
in all. 

Why do children love rhythmic games? Why 
do youths and maidens delight in dance and song? 
Why " does the sailor work better for his yo-heave- 
o," and the " soldier march better and fight better 
for the trumpet and drum? " Why were the first 
dances regularly repeated leaps, the first poetry 
metrical chants, the first musical instruments those 
which marked off or measured sound? Why can 
we speak of a scale of color and define architecture 
as frozen music? Why do we feel that in a very 
deep and true sense music is the soul of all the arts ? 
Why do we cherish Job's thought of morning stars 
singing together for joy, and cling to the Pytha- 
gorean conception of the music of the spheres? 
These questions are answered by reflecting that art 
is the self-revelation of spirit, and hence that all 
its products must bear the image of consciousness 
which is the distinctive characteristic of spirit. 
Consciousness is " the knowing of the self by the 
self." This implies an annulled distinction be- 
tween subject and object. Such an annulled dis- 
tinction is identity, and the ever-repeated move- 



136 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

ment from distinction to identification can be de- 
scribed by no better word than rliytlim. Hence all 
rhythmic movements and all rhythmic sounds may 
be translated into the tireless affirmation / am /. 
What rhythm is to the arts of movement and sound, 
proportion or visible rhythm is to architecture, 
sculpture, and painting. Finally, since the world 
is the self-revelation of the divine mind, it too is 
a work of art into which the supreme Artist has 
breathed his own life. Quickened by this insight, 
I remember with strange pleasure that the very 
word rhythm points by its derivation to the un- 
dulating stream. The swaying grass, the waving 
wheat, the rhythmic flight of the bird, the accord- 
ant colors of flowers, touch me with new emotion. 
I find deeper meaning in " the primal chimes of sun 
and shade, of sound and echo." I picture to myself 
the mazy courses of the stars and their harmoni- 
ously proportioned periods. I behold the " dance 
of Xature forward and far," and hear the very 
" atoms marching to tune." At last I learn from 
science that " the flux of power is eternally the 
same, that it rolls in music through the ages, and 
that all terrestrial energy, the manifestations of 
life as well as the display of phenomena, are but 



HEAVEX'S FIRST LAW. 137 

the modulations of its rhythm," * Then my soul is 
filled with mystic awe, and in the ceaseless pulsa- 
tions of jDersistent energy I read the cosmic procla- 
mation of that great name by which God revealed 
himself to his ancient people — Jehovah — the ab- 
solute and eternal I Am. 

And so the infant, a rhythmic soul in a rhyth- 
mic body, is born into a rhythmic universe. 
Strange indeed would it be if he gave no signs of 
the universal impulse, or if simple mother-wit had 
failed to detect and respond to his intimations. 
That there has been no such failure is proved by 
nursery games like Pat-a-cake and Shoe the Mare, 
by the gentle pats and strokes which soothe the rest- 
less baby, by the song which lulls him to sleep, 
by the dancing and dandling to which he responds 
with gleeful laugh. Almost equally strange would 
it be had Froebel omitted to notice either the hint 
of the child or the response of the mother, or had he 
failed to elicit and apply the educational principle 
latent in their joint suggestion. He vindicates our 
reasonable demand upon his insight by calling at- 
tention in the Education of Man to the maternal 
procedure, by explaining that through rhythmic 
* The Idea of God, John Fiske, p. 146. 



138 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

movements tlie cliild is made to feel liis own inner 
life, and by insisting that the development of such 
movements increases harmony of character, dimin- 
ishes wilfulness and coarseness, fosters firmness and 
moderation, and awakens appreciation of Nature 
and art.* He vindicates our demand upon him as 
a practical educator by creating his Mother-Plays 
and his kindergarten games with their threefold 
rhythm, f 

In this connection it seems to me important to 
ask Helen if she has consciously faced a question 
upon whose answer depends the direction in which 
kindergarten games shall hereafter develop. Some 
kindergartners are beginning to feel that no game 
should have a fixed form, and a few even question 
whether there should be any fixed games. It is 
suggested that each day should evolve its own plays, 
and that these should be the joint product of kin- 
dergartner and children. Under this hypothesis the 
rhythmic form of the games tends to disappear, as 
does also their association with definite poems and 

* Education of Man, Ilailmann's translation, pp. 69, 70, 
218, 219. 

f See Pedagogies of tlio Kindergarten, Miss Jarvis's trans- 
lation, pp. 336-285. 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 139 

melodies. Thus far tlie movement in this direction 
is a vague and shifting one; indeed, it is rather a 
tendency than a movement. It seems to me a dan- 
gerous tendency. I believe that the prototype of 
the kindergarten game is not the capricious play 
of the individual child, but the traditional ring, 
dance, and representative game of which King Wil- 
liam, Oats, Peas, Beans, and the Mulberry Bush 
are familiar illustrations; and the original games 
of analogous type produced by a group of playing 
children as described by Froebel in the Pedagogics 
of the Kindergarten. I believe that it is dangerous 
to invade the realm of the spontaneity of the child 
by introducing into the kindergarten the type of 
play ordinarily determined by the free self-impul- 
sion of individual children. The value of such plays 
depends upon their very caprice and arbitrariness. 
It is because in them the child exercises his powers 
according to his natural proclivities that they de- 
velop his individuality. Mothers and kindergart- 
ners should carefully observe such plays in order 
that they may understand the children committed 
to their care. They should refuse to tamper with 
them because all mature interference tends to de- 
stroy their spontaneity. They belong not to the 
11 



140 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

kindergarten, but to the nursery and the play- 
ground. Their introduction into the kindergarten, 
and above all their guidance by the kindergartner, 
is not an extension of the child's freedom, but a 
dangerous attack upon it. The traditional game, 
on the contrary, is an expression not of the par- 
ticular child, but of universal childhood. Its sub- 
ject-matter is generally suggestive, sometimes ques- 
tionable, occasionally pernicious. Its poetic form 
is nearly always bad. Froebel seized upon the 
traditional game, caught the hint suggested by its 
recurrent subjects, eliminated its objectionable 
features, recognized the charm of music, poetry, 
and measured movement, and thus created the kin- 
dergarten plays. Ask Helen to give these thoughts 
her serious consideration. Then, if she allows her- 
self to be borne along upon the stream of present 
tendency she will at least know whither she is 
going. 

From these byways of thought I return to the 
clock, the secret of whose fascination I hope you 
now clearly understand. Its swinging pendulum 
is the visible image of our oscillating consciousness, 
its monotonous tick-tack-tick an audible symbol of 
our self-repelling, self-attracting ego. ]^o wonder 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 141 

the child wants to know what it says. No wonder 
that Froebel translates its rhythmic utterance into 
the call to lead a rhythmic life. A time to wash, 
and a time to eat; a time to play, and a time to 
sleep! Out of the chaos of the infant conscious- 
ness the four great events of his daily life emerge 
as points of light, and with their dimmest recogni- 
tion he begins inwardly to order his thought, and 
outwardly to order his doings. 

My sensitive consciousness of the adverse critic 
makes me anticipate a protest even from you. 
What need of Froebel or his song of the clock? 
Everybody knows that " order is heaven's first 
law," and every sensible mother tries with all her 
might to make her children orderly. Far be it 
from me to question either assertion. Were order 
not a universal law Froebel would not have con- 
cerned himself with it. Did sensible mothers not 
try to make their children orderly he would scarce- 
ly have endeavored to rouse all mothers to the 
same effort. Perhaps, however, he may have no- 
ticed a tendency to force order upon the child in- 
stead of developing it from him; perhaps he may 
have recognized that while no good habit is formed 
witliout struggle, struggle itself should be the spon- 



142 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

taneous answer of the soul to spiritual allurement; 
perhaps, therefore, he may have imagined that the 
charm of the clock might be consciously used as a 
means of wakening the ideal of order, and through 
this ideal inciting the effort necessary to form 
habits of order. 

A rigidly enforced order tends to produce an 
inward recoil of the soul against order. Froebel's 
ideal is to stir the child's soul with premonitions 
of the importance of order, and of the beauty of 
order, and through these premonitions nerve him 
to the conflict with indolence and wayward im- 
pulse which the habit of order implies. 

The conversation between mother and child in 
the commentary is a further appeal to the sympa- 
thies stirred by the play. The child wants mamma 
to show him a picture, but it is his time for the 
afternoon bath. So the mother points him to his 
kitten, who is smoothing her fur as if expecting 
welcome visitors, reminds him that paj)a will soon 
be home and will want to find his darling neat 
and clean. The child must deny himself the 
picture-book, but if the self-denial is to have 
any educative value it must be voluntary. More- 
over, the motive of giving pleasure to papa lifts 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 143 

mere punctuality into an act of loving considera- 
tion. 

After tliis conversation Froebel makes wliat 
seems at first sight a digression from tlie subject of 
punctuality to that of cleanliness. A little reflec- 
tion, however, shows us that there is an intimate 
tie between the two virtues. Punctuality is order 
in time. The unpunctual man is always where he 
should not be. Cleanliness is order in space. Un- 
cleanliness puts matter out of place. It belongs to 
the ground, not to the human body. From the 
thought of physical cleanliness the commentary 
rises to that of a clean heart. In the Tick-Tack 
Song also, Froebel suggests a connection between 
orderly activity and spiritual purity. It is easy to 
develop his idea. You should have risen at half -past 
six, and you indolently lie in bed until seven. You 
hurry to be ready for breakfast. In your haste you 
tear a garment, burst off an important button, or 
produce some other irritating catastrophe. Al- 
ready nervous, you enter the breakfast room ten 
minutes behind time, to find the other members of 
the household disarranged by your tardiness. 
Your husband mentions that he will be late for an 
important business engagement. The children are 



144 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

hurried off to school, and are fretful in conse- 
quence. There is no time for the pleasant ameni- 
ties of a family breakfast. During the morning 
household work is indifferently performed, and 
your servants are quick to blame the late break- 
fast. You begin to feel it is hard that you can't 
once in a while take a morning nap without so 
much direct and indirect reproach. You are get- 
ting into a bad temper. Then comes the unex- 
pected strain and you are betrayed into some act 
of passion, self-love meantime asserting stoutly 
that you are ill used. Evidently your inner cosmos 
is falling into primeval chaos; there is no light or 
order in your spiritual world — nothing but a tu- 
mult of colliding emotions. 

It is well, however, to remember that procras- 
tination is not the only, perhaps not even the 
worst, thief of time. To overcrowd time is as dis- 
astrous as to empty it. To steal for one purpose 
time which rightly belongs to another is to defeat 
all true purposes. How many men steal the break- 
fast hour to read the newspaper! How many men 
and women steal for work the hours which belong 
to sleep, and then to avoid physical bankruptcy 
steal for sleep the hours which belong to recrea- 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 145 

tion ! In how many families are the cords of affec- 
tion strained and broken because there is no time 
for participation in simple joys or for kindly sym- 
pathy in petty woes! How many men by persist- 
ent thefts from the hours which belong to sleep, to 
meals, and to recreation, steal years from their 
allotted period of life! Reminding yourself of 
these commonplace facts, you will realize that we 
never outgrow the need of the clock's call to a 
rhythmic life, and that not only for your children, 
but for their busy mother it is important to have 
'•' a time to wash and a time to eat, a time to sleep 
and a time to play. Ordered time means serenity, 
power, self-command, liberty. Slothfulness, pro- 
crastination, and overwork recoil upon some na- 
tures by periods of morbid depression, and expose 
others to the danger of being tossed about by gusts 
of passion as the rudderless ship is tossed on the 
stormy sea. 

A quick-witted maiden of my acquaintance de- 
fends her boredom in the society of a dull admirer 
by remarking, with a yawn, that his thought has 
only chronological connections. Her remark has 
a general application, for there is no surer test of 
either a stupid or an uncultivated person than the 



146 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

absence from consciousness of all relations save 
those of time and place. Coleridge calls our atten- 
tion to Shakespeare's humorous portrayal of this 
characteristic in the narratives of illiterate persons, 
and gives as an illustration " the easy yielding Mrs. 
Quickly's relation of the circumstances of Sir John 
Falstaff's debt to her." 

" Falstajf. What is the gross sum that I owe 
thee? " 

" Host. Marry, if thou wert an honest man, 
thyself and the money, too. Thou didst swear to 
me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dol- 
phin chamber, at a round table, by a sea-coal fire, 
upon Wednesday in Whitsun week, when the 
prince broke thy head for liking his father to a 
singing man of Windsor; thou didst swear to me 
then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me 
and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny 
it? Did not goodwife Kcech, the butcher's wife, 
come in then and call me Gossip Quickly? — coming 
in to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling us she had 
a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst de- 
sire to eat some; whereby I told thee they were 
ill for a green wound, etc." 

While it indicates a lack of culture to empha- 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 147 

size merely local and temporal connections, tlie fact 
tliat objects and events recur in memory united 
with, their original accompaniments in time and 
space suggests that the reaction of order upon intel- 
lect is no less important and beneficial than its re- 
action upon emotion, and that to have a time and 
place for everything, and everything in its time 
and place, is to begin the preparation of the mind 
for logical thinking. Hence Froebel only realizes 
our expectations when to the Clock Song, which 
deals with the organization of time, he adds the 
plays of the Bird's Nest, the Pigeon House, and 
JSTumbering the Fingers, illustrating in the two 
former the order or relativity of objects in space, 
and pointing in the latter to the organization of 
space through the mastery of number. From these 
initial forms of order he rises to the order of 
rhythmic games and regulated productive activity. 
In the use of his gifts he insists upon obedience to 
two fundamental rules, the first of which is that in 
each exercise the child shall recognize and respect 
the relationship of whole and parts; the second 
that he shall develop each new form from its pred- 
ecessor. Obviously, the one rule rests upon the 
principle of unity or relativity in space, the other 



148 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

upon the principle of evolution or connectedness in 
time. The so-called Froebelian law of the Media- 
tion of Opj)osites in its most frequent application 
is simply a recognition of aesthetic order and unity 
as illustrated upon the plane of development which 
has advanced beyond simple repetition to the rec- 
ognition of correspondence. Just as peoples in a 
low stage of aesthetic culture insist upon making 
the human form symmetrical by matching the face 
on the front side of the head with a face at the 
back, and the arms directed forward with arms 
directed backward, so the young child constructs 
" forms of beauty " by consciously applying with- 
in proper limits the principles of symmetry.* 
Finally, alike through intercourse with kinder- 
gartner and comrades, and through games symboliz- 
ing the family, civil society, state, and church, the 
young soul is stirred with premonitions of social 
order and its correlative idea, social responsibility. 

* It is, I hope, needless to explain that no intelligent dis- 
ciple of Froebel claims for such symmetrical figures any great 
aesthetic merit. The claim urged in their behalf is the psy- 
chologic one that they represent the stage of aesthetic devel- 
opment reached alike by little children and primitive peoples, 
and that the mind must climb through symmetry in order to 
reach the higher plane of culture which creates and enjoys 
harmony. 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. I49 

In connection with tlie tliouglit of social order 
it is interesting to remember tliat it is really tlie 
j)arent both of punctuality and the clock. The 
savage lives a detached and timeless life. Mr. 
Drummond relates that when he went to Africa 
he " was innocent enough to include a watch among 
the presents which he took with him to projiitiate 
the native chiefs." He adds that he " might as 
well have taken a grand piano, for the idea of time 
has scarcely penetrated the African intellect, and 
forms no element whatever in its calculations. In 
the morning the native rises suddenly from the 
ground where he has lain like a log all night. 
Often he neither washes nor eats. His sole indus- 
try is to grow millet, and apart from the little time 
given to this rough tillage his only occupation is to 
talk." With this timeless existence contrast the 
measured days of civilized man, and you will not 
only realize the relationship between social organi- 
zation and the clock, but will be more than ever 
anxious to cultivate in Harold a prompt and sympa- 
thetic obedience to its call, as well as to the sum- 
mons of the musical gong, which by announcing 
meals regulates the order of family duties, to the 
school bell, the church bell, and all the other sig- 



150 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

nals whereby our complex corporate life is meas- 
ured and harmonized. 

Punctuality is essentially a social virtue. To 
be tardy is to be selfish and inconsiderate. By 
awakening in children a recognition of this 
truth we dignify the effort to be punctual and 
make it one means of forming an unselfish char- 
acter. 

Another message for Helen! One of the great- 
est needs of the kindergarten is a well-balanced 
division of time. Many questions will have to be 
settled before it can be made. What amount of 
time should be given to general opening exercises, 
to stories, to talks? How long may little children 
be expected to concentrate their attention on pro- 
ductive exercises? How long may they safely use 
their eyes for sewing, weaving, folding? How 
long is it well to stand on the circle? How long 
may they sing without strain to their voices? What 
is the relative value of the different kindergarten 
exercises? How many times during the morning 
do the children need entire relaxation? These are 
only a few of the problems which suggest them- 
selves for careful consideration. Upon success in 
solving them will depend in great measure the edu- 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 151 

cational outcome of the child's experience in the 
kindergarten. 

Unless I am much mistaken only one question 
remains to be touched upon before we dismiss the 
Clock Song, considered in its first aspect as a point 
of departure for child nurture. You must have no- 
ticed in Froebel's commentary that he seems not 
fully satisfied with the several explanations of the 
clock's allurement given in his third paragraph, 
and expresses his conviction that the delight of chil- 
dren in watching, imitating, and making time- 
pieces springs from a dim presentiment of the im- 
portance of time itself. In my own judgment the 
different explanations apply to different periods of 
development. The mysterious life in the clock, its 
rhythmic utterance, its oscillating pendulum, at- 
tract the young child. A dawning sense of the im- 
portance of time, explains the boy's love of making 
time-pieces. There are three ascending stages of 
interest in the clock. The baby watches it, the 
young child imitates it, the boy tries to make it. 
In other words, the baby feels the allurement of 
rhythm; the child through imitation develops a 
rhythmic consciousness; the boy aspires to create 
the instrument which makes possible a rhythmic 



152 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

life. In the picture accompanying tlie Tick-Tack 
Song, several children are shown setting up a clock 
of their own manufacture. It would seem natural 
that the soul which begins early to assert its mas- 
tery over JSTature should strive to subdue and order 
time. These moments always coming, always go- 
ing, how shall the boy catch them, count them, 
measure them ? The clock accomplishes these feats. 
Could he then make the clock he would be master- 
ing and ordering time, and so mastering and order- 
ing his own life. 

Since both you and I believe that child nurture 
implies self-culture, and since we recognize that the 
intimations of child life waken in the souls of de- 
vout mothers problems whose solution taxes the 
power of the deepest thinkers, I dare not bring this 
letter to a close without putting into words a ques- 
tion which has been ringing through my mind all 
the time I have been writing it. We have recog- 
nized as the source of the clock's allurement the 
correspondence of rhythmic sound and vibratory 
motion with the perj^etual oscillation of thought 
between subject and object. I must now ask you to 
reflect that time itself is this same pulsation. We 
talk of infinite time; we picture time as a never- 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 153 

ending line. In truth, liowever, time is a series of 
points; a succession of moments, only one of wliicli 
is ever real; an actual now, trembling between a 
past and a future, both of which are not. Wliat 
is this strange thing we call time, this ever-vanish- 
ing, ever-reappearing point; this ever-dying, ever- 
living moment; this self -repelling, self -attracting 
unit; this "eternal flight from the alone to the 
alone?" 

I think our wrestle with the paradox of time be- 
gins earlier than most of us imagine, and that the 
reason we ignore the prescient anticipations of 
childhood and youth is because in maturity we in- 
continently dismiss the enigma without solving it. 
Whoever finds its solution will become aware of its 
haunting presence from the dawn of his conscious 
thought. Have you forgotten your perplexity over 
Grimm's story of the king who questioned how 
many seconds there were in eternity, and your dis- 
satisfaction with the answer of the sage little shep- 
herd boy? Did you never grapple with the paradox 
of the tortoise and the swift-footed Achilles? Did 
you feel no strange thrill when you first learned 
that looking up at the nightly heavens we behold 
the distant stars, not as they are, but as they were 



154 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

long ages ago? Have you never read witli baffled 
amazement sayings like that of the Cherubinic Pil- 
grim: 

,a»4*^ " The rose which here thine eye externally doth see 
Hath blossomed thus in God from all eternity." 

And wlien in your ardent youth you pored over 
Sartor Resartus, did nothing in your inmost self 
respond to its challenge to " sweep away the Illu- 
sion of Time," to its assurance that so doing " you 
should know this fair universe, were it in the mean- 
est i^rovince thereof to be in very deed the star- 
domed city of God," should realize that " through 
every star, through every grass blade, and most 
through every living soul, the glory of a present 
God still beams? " 

Knowing you, I am sure that these memories 
of my soul will stir echoes in yours, and I shall 
therefore not forbear the effort to show you the 
insights in Avhich they seem to me to find their vin- 
dication and their solution. 

The maxim of science that objects must be 
studied in their history applies no less to things of 
thought than to things of sense. To trace the 
original evolution of any great insight is to begin 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 155 

to understand it. In a minor degree it is helpful to 
know how any individual learns to rethink an al- 
ready known truth. So I intend to be biographical, 
and my hope is that by retracing the broken and 
winding path by which I plodded toward insight 
into the true nature of time I may help you to see 
what I see. Since, moreover, time and space are 
but different phases of a single mental act, I shall 
not attempt to separate them in relating my rem- 
iniscences. 

My first genuine insight was into the revolu- 
tionary truth which, as everybody knows, is the 
burden of Kant's message to the world. Experience 
is partial and contingent. Therefore, no ideas pos- 
sessing the marks of universality and necessity can 
have been thence derived. Space and time are 
both universal and necessary ideas; universal or 
infinite, because they can be bounded only by them- 
selves; necessary, because they are the pre-supposi- 
tions of all experience. Since they are not deriv- 
able from experience, they must be given in the 
constitution of the mind itself. There is no other 
alternative, 

Kever shall I forget the afternoon when this in- 
sight first broke upon me, but I will not imitate 
12 



156 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

Mrs. Quickly and expand this already long letter by 
relating the external setting of an intensive experi- 
ence. I will only say that I was listening to a lec- 
ture, and that I had heard the very same lecture 
just a week before without perceiving in it any 
real meaning. The light seemed to flash upon me 
all at once, though I now feel sure it had been 
slowly dawning during the days which elapsed be- 
tween the two lectures. My first consciousness was 
that I stood upon a new plane of thought, and that 
henceforth my entire mental landscape must take 
on a changed aspect. My next thought was that 
I had found an anchor of the soul sure and stead- 
fast. Up to this time I had held myself to faith in 
spiritual realities by an effort of will, but I knew 
that in its inmost citadel my soul was without se- 
cure defenses. Again and again I had said to my- 
self: " Things seem to me to be thus or so, but 
how can I be sure they will not seem quite differ- 
ent to-morrow? " My thought, chameleon-like., 
changed its color with every book I read, every 
sermon I heard, every discussion in which I bore 
a part, above all with every deep experience either 
of sorrow or joy. In a word, " dream delivered me 
to dream, and there was no end to illusion." But 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 157 

from the moment I really understood that there 
were universal and necessary ideas, and that they 
were indigenous to the soul, I knew once for all 
that there was a land of pure delight, a realm of 
thought wherein all was light, peace, assurance, and 
permanence. 

There is a new birth of the intellect as well as a 
new birth of the heart, and it gives one feelings 
very like those of a religious convert. Whoever 
has experienced this mental regeneration knows 
that no matter how many thinkers have possessed 
and described the insight which transforms his 
mind, and no matter how often he may have read or 
heard such descriptions, the vision when it comes is 
as new as if no spiritual eye had ever gazed upon 
it. The visible world is created afresh for each 
newborn child, the spiritual world is a " fresh divine 
improvisation " to every regenerate thinker. His 
solitary bliss is, however, soon enhanced by the 
consciousness that he is admitted as member into 
the church invisible. He pictures to himself the 
victorious thinkers who across the ages have flashed 
to each other electric messages from the mountain 
peaks of thought. He is inwardly aware that if 
he will forsake the easy plain and climb the peak, 



158 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

he too may behold the unrolling panorama of the 
universe. 

For some years I was more interested In the 
general fact that all universal and necessary truths 
were constitutive forms of mind than in the rela- 
tionship of this fact to the ideas of space and time. 
Of course, if time and space were forms of 
thought, then idealism was true, and we were deni- 
zens of a spiritual cosmos. I admitted this truth, 
but my recognition of it was lifeless and inert. 
Meantime I was thinking much about self -activity. 
All Froebelians talked about it. Few of them 
seemed to know just what they meant by it. I per- 
ceived that it was exhibited in ascending degrees 
by plant, animal, man. I became aware of the 
fact that these ascending degrees were character- 
ized by a progressive diminution in the power of 
environment. I comprehended that in its highest 
potency as pure thought self-activity was also self- 
environment; that it originated, impelled, sus- 
tained, and developed its own processes, and that 
in so doing it was forever realizing and fulfilling it- 
self. Finally, it became clear to me on the one 
hand that being the highest, thought must also be 
the parent form of all self -active processes, and on 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 159 

the other that the so-called " forms of thought " 
must not be conceived as static molds into which 
sense-impressions were somehow poured, but as 
greater or small cycles of organizing energy. 

The several insights I have described were re- 
inforced by a gradual recognition of the process 
through which the mind ascends from perception 
to conception. It is commonly said that language 
is the criterion of the human as distinguished from 
the animal soul. It is also generally recognized 
that language deals not with particular but with 
general objects, actions, and relations. The noun 
man includes men of all races, colors, and condi- 
tions; the verb to love is used to express all varie- 
ties of this universal passion; the prepositions 
above, below, refer to all particular examples of 
these general relationships. We call our recogni- 
tion of such general classes of objects, acts, and re- 
lations concepts, in contradistinction to percepts 
which are identifications of particulars as belonging 
to these classes. What I now came to see was that 
our knowledge of concepts or general classes arises 
through an act of introspection wherein the mind 
contemplates its own activity in recalling a sense- 
perception. We know that we can mentally revive 



160 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

any given perception, that we can repeat this pro- 
cess at will, and thus produce an indefinite series of 
images each of which resembles all the others. 
Projecting this mental experience we infer that back 
of the particular objects perceived by sense must 
be generic activities which are their causes or cre- 
ators, and recognize each object as one product of 
an ancestral energy whose possible offspring are in- 
finite in number but similar in kind. Hence the 
word rose means really rose-producing energy; the 
words plant and animal mean plant- and animal- 
producing energies; the word man means man- 
producing energy; the common noun in each case 
referring to an active cause which generates par- 
ticular images of its own ideal. Smaller circles 
of causal energy are differentiations of larger ones, 
the rose-producing energy, for example, being a 
specification of the more general plant-producing 
energy. Finally, just as particular objects are 
mere manifestations of causal energy, and lesser 
causal energies differentiations of greater ones, so 
all causal energies are specifications of one inclu- 
sive and transcendant energy, and the movement 
of thought from objects to classes, from smaller to 
larger classes, from all particular classes to the gen- 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 161 

eral concept of force, and from the concept of force 
to its definition as creative thouglit is simply a 
vortical descent into the abyss of its own being, 
or, better, its vortical ascent into the divine 
mind.* 

This new insight began to associate itself with 
an image. I pictured the moon revolving on her 
axis, while at the same time performing her circuit 
around the earth; the earth in turn making her 
diurnal revolution, while, bearing along the 
tethered moon, she circled around the sun; the 
sun, sweeping through space, while with him jour- 
neyed his whole retinue of planets and their at- 
tendant satellites, innumerable solar systems mov- 
ing in complex curves around some unknown cen- 
ter of the universe. Surely these " circles of the 
heavens correspond to the circles of intellect," are 
indeed the visible symbols of divine thought which 
at once transcends and includes all smaller cycles 
of causation in its infinite sweep. Surely, too, the 
human mind through retracing these ascending 
and widening circles frees itself from the thrall- 
dom of sense, and learns to rethink the thought 
of God. 

* See Psychologic Foundations of Education, pp. 190-197. 



162 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

If you have followed the narrative of my men- 
tal experiences you will be ready for the synthesis 
I shall now try to make. I had learned that the 
mind possessed universal and necessary ideas, that 
such ideas were really plastic energies, and that in 
proportion to their recognition was our discovery of 
the truth of the external world. It seemed to me 
very wonderful that only by withdrawal from sense 
could sensible phenomena be explained, and that 
in the " abysmal depths of our own personality " we 
should discover the secret of objective processes. I 
began to understand that mind was one and indi- 
visible; that in so far as we possessed it we were 
partakers of divine activity; that universal and 
necessary ideas were the ideas of God, and that our 
discovery of them was his revelation. Caird's Phi- 
losophy of Religion fell into my hands, and I read 
that " thought is the blank form of an infinite 
content." The hlank form of thought could mean 
nothing but the energy of thought apart from its 
specific contents. The characteristic of this energy 
was consciousness, and consciousness was the distinc- 
tion of the self from the self, the recognition of the 
self by the self. This self-distinction and self- 
identification must, therefore, be the infinite cycle 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 163 

within which all lesser cycles revolved. The state- 
ment that sjDace and time were forms of thought 
began to mean something to me. Amiel's Journal 
helped me by the suggestion that " space and time 
were dispersion, mind concentration, that in the 
state of thought the universe occupies but a single 
point, while in the state of dispersion and analysis 
this thought requires the heaven of heavens for its 
expansion." " God," it was added, " is outside time 
because he thinks all thought at once. Nature is 
within time, because she is only speech, the discur- 
sive unfolding of each thought contained within 
the divine thought." The resemblance of space to 
that phase of consciousness which distinguishes the 
self from the self dawned upon me, and just when 
I was ready for the message I read in Dr. Harris's 
Logic of Hegel the statement that " everywhere 
in space the point is outside of every other point, 
but each point is unreal. Only the separation of 
points is real, the points themselves are unreal in 
space." * What were these unreal points with 
their real separation but an affirmation of the 
form of consciousness without its content? the 
" self perfectly empty outside the self as per- 
* See Dr. Harris, Hegel's Logic, p. 265. 



164 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

f ectly empty " ? And, again, wliat was that " self- 
repulsion of the point," which we call time, if 
not the other phase of personality, the " identi- 
fication of the self by the self which completes 
the act of consciousness " ? Infinite space, infinite 
time, were they anything but the ceaseless swing 
of the pendulum of divine thought, the primal 
revolution of " the wheel on w^hich all beings 
ride"? 

Empty space and time of their contents and 
you have the blank mold of divine consciousness. 
Fill both with the infinite universe and you have 
that consciousness in its concrete realization. View 
the universe under the form of space and it appears 
as an articulated whole, a living organism, " which 
is all symmetry, full of proportions," and wherein 
" each part may call the farthest brother." View 
it under the form of time, and it becomes a great 
musical drama, enacting in swift rushing scenes the 
ascent from chaos through matter, motion, star 
dust, revolving spheres, organic life, and human 
institutions, to the blessedness of the archetypal 
church. View it under the form of eternity, 
which is the form of thought, and it shines forth 
a structural system of divine ideas, a perpetual 



HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW. 165 

revelation of divine love. Always complete, al- 
ways renewed, it merges past and future in one 
concrete eternal moment. All that has been 
persists, all that shall be is. The first second 
of eternity never passes. The archetypal rose 
blossoms forever. 

" There past, present, fixture shoot 
Triple blossoms from one root. 
• Substances at base divided 

In their summits are united. 
There the holy essence rolls, 
One, through separated souls ; 
And the sunny .Ton sleeps, 
Folding Nature in its deeps." 

Dear friend, I have seen something, and I have 
tried to tell you what I saw, but I can not make the 
vision stand out in words as it stands out in my 
mind. If, however, you have caught my hints, you 
know at least that Jehovah is not the true name of 
God. His higher name is Father. His highest 
name is Love. The rhythmic undulations of per- 
sistent force are his lowest self-revelation. His 
higher revelation is the concrete universe, his high- 
est revelation the being made in his own image, 
his perfect image one who said : " He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father." Supply with your 



166 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

thought the defects in mine. Confirm my vision 
by beholding it, heighten my joy by sharing it, 
fortify by your mental regeneration my hope of a 
time when all men shall seek that piety of the in- 
tellect which is no less essential to true living than 
piety of the heart and will. 



LETTER YI. 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 

TASTE SONG. 

As each new life is given to the world, 
The senses — like a door that swings two ways — 
Stand ever 'twixt its inner, waiting self 
And that environment with which its lot 
Awhile is cast. 

A door that swings two ways : 
Inward at first it turns, while Nature speaks, 
To greet her guest and bid him to her feast. 
And tell him of all things in her domain, 
The good or ill of each, and how to use ; 
Then outward, to set free an answering thought. 
And so, swift messages fly back and forth 
Without surcease — until, behold ! she, who 
Like gracious host received a timid guest. 
Owns in that guest at length her rightful lord, 
And gladly serves him, asking no reward ! 

This parable, dear mother, is for you, 
Whom God has made his steward for your child. 
All Nature is a unit in herself. 
Yet but a part of a far greater whole. 
Little by little you may teach your child 
To know her ways, and live in harmony 
With her ; and then, in turn, help him through her 
To find those verities within himself, 
Of which all outward things are but the type. 
So when he passes from your sheltering care 

167 



168 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

To walk the ways of men, his soul shall be 
Knit to all things that are, and still most free ! 
And of him shall be writ at last this word, 
"At peace with Nature, with himself, and God." 

Henrietta E. Eliot. 

TASTE SONG. 

Here's a berry i-ipe and sweet 
Taste, my darling, taste and eat. 

Now this sour fruit instead, — 
Ah ! my baby shakes his head. 

Here's an almond, taste it, pet, 
Bitter things we sometimes get. 

Bitter, sour, sweet, he tries, 
Tasting makes my baby wise ! 

Sweets we must not always choose 
Sour, bitter, too, we use. 

Fruits unripe we'll let alone 
Till they fully ripe have grown. 

Emilie Poulsson. 

Dear : Nowliere in tlie Motlier-Play does 

the connection between revealing example and 
principle revealed seem at first sight so obscure as 
in the Song of Taste. On the one hand we are 
shown the mother playfully inciting her baby to 
distinguish between the sweet, the sour, and the bit- 
ter; on the other our thought is impetuously hurled 
toward that eminence from which all material ob- 
jects are seen to be afire with spirit, and the sensible 
w^orld is revealed as a bodily and visible gospel. 
Our inward eyes are too weak to gaze undazzled 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. IQQ 

upon the view which expands before them, so we 
shut them tight and declare there is nothing to be 
seen. 

Forget for a while, dear friend, the baffling 
vision, and sit down humbly and patiently at the 
feet of your own maternal memories. You have 
sent me notes affirming that on the fourth day of 
his life Harold stoutly refused cow's milk diluted 
with water until a few grains of sugar had made 
it acceptable to his taste,* and that aged seven 
weeks he made a wry face and a gesture of refusal 
at the mere sight of a bitter medicine, f a single 
dose of which had previously been given him. 
You remember your terror at the way he used to 
pick up pins and carry them into his mouth, and 
the many devices by which you tried to break up 
this habit. You know that even when he was 
seventeen months old he insisted upon tasting the 
hyacinth you had given him to smell,:}: and you 
will recall your own delight when, a month later, 
he began to i)ut the sweet-smelling flower to his 

* The Senses and the Will, Preyer, p. 124. 
f Perez, the First Three Years of Childhood, translated 
by Alice M. Christie. 

X The Senses and the Will, Preyer, p. 135. 



lYO LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

nose, keeping liis mouth meantime tightly shut. 
You are inwardly aware of the fact that, impelled 
by instinct, you did all the things which Froebel 
pictures you as doing, and since I, the mere on- 
looker, remember, you, the mother, can not have 
forgotten with what joy you assured yourself by 
repeated experiments that Harold associated with 
the words sweet, sour, bitter, the sensations to 
which they refer. 

To interpret your pleasure recall what Froebel 
says in his commentary on Play with the Limbs, 
that " developing activity is the oil which feeds the 
sacred flame of mother love." When Harold re- 
fused unsweetened milk it was a sure sign to you 
that he was sensitive to diiferences of taste. His 
wry face at sight of bitter medicine showed that he 
rememhei'ed an earlier sensation of taste; while the 
habit of carrying all things to his month told you 
that he had begun to use it as a " test organ by 
which to ascertain the qualities of objects." When 
he ceased to put sweet-smelling flowers into his 
mouth you knew that he had learned to distinguish 
between sensations of smell and sensations of taste, 
and to refer each to its appropriate organ. Finally, 
when he responded intelligently to the words sweet, 



THE KEVELATION TO SENSE. lYl 

sour, bitter, he showed you that he had not only 
discriminated between sensations of taste but also 
between sensations of sound, and, furthermore, that 
he had been able to perform the complex mental 
act of uniting specific sounds with specific tastes. 

The outcome of these and kindred experiences 
must be a suspicion that the sense of taste plays an 
important part in both mental and moral develop- 
ment, and such a suspicion is abundantly confirmed 
by the experiments of physiological psychology. 
According to Professor Preyer, taste is universally 
the first sense to become discriminative; according 
to Sigismund it is the first to yield clear percep- 
tions to which memory is attached. Professor 
Tracy tells us that the pleasures and pains of taste 
play a large part in the natural education of in- 
fancy, and Dr. Hall affirms that the mouth is the 
first center of psychic life.* 

These statements must not be taken to mean too 
much. All truly psychic activity implies a conscious 
exercise of comparison, whereas the infant's reac- 
tions to gustatory stimuli are only mimetic reflex 
movements. On the other hand, since all activity 
gives a bias to the actor, these reflex movements are 

* See Tracy, The Psychology of Childhood, pp. 21-23. 
13 



172 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

of importance in fixing tendencies of thouglit, feel- 
ing, and will. It has been well said that " every 
mental phenomenon passes through a graduated 
ascending series of development. At first the 
physiological preponderates, consciousness is at its 
minimum, and the so-called mental phenomenon 
would be more accurately defined as the reaction of 
the nervous system to external stimuli or organic 
conditions. . . . When intellect and will have be- 
come sufficiently developed, the child directs his 
attention to the act, makes it his own, and performs 
it voluntarily. The process, perhaps, has not 
changed at all to outward appearance, but when 
viewed from the inner side it is seen to have been 
completely transformed in character." * It is the 
fact that the higher activity is a transformation, 
and not an isolated, detached, and aboriginal begin- 
ning which gives importance to the impulses, re- 
flexes, and instincts of infancy and early child- 
hood. 

From failure to realize the significance of these 
facts arise some of the most fatal mistakes of nur- 
sery education. By making food a sensual pleasure 
we betray children into epicurism and gluttony, 
* Tracy, The Psychology of Childhood, p. 6. 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 173 

and through these create a tendency toward more 
fatal forms of self-indulgence. False feeding en- 
genders false appetite, and from false appetite 
springs the habit of intemperate drinking. 

Froebel's suggestions with regard to the child's 
food are as simple as they are radical, and are drawn 
out of his conception of man as ideally a creative 
being. Whatever interferes with the realization 
of this ideal is wrong, what assists it is right. The 
test of both the quality and quantity of food is: 
Does it make the child inert or active? If it in- 
duces sloth it is setting appetite above energy, and 
creating a tendency toward vice. We do the child 
great wrong when we give him too highly seasoned 
and too delicately seductive food, and when we not 
only permit but encourage excess in eating. We 
commit a crime against his soul when by allow- 
ing him to be idle we make him the victim of ennui, 
and when the little victim becomes a restless tor- 
ment seek selfish deliverance from his exactions by 
giving him something dainty to eat. Above all, we 
abase his ideal by our bad example, and we shall 
have to be temperate ourselves before we can hope 
to form the habit of temperance in children. For 
the outcome of restricting them while indulging 



174 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

ourselves is to beget tlie hope of future sensual en- 
joyment as a reward of present privation. Wliat 
we say in effect is: Little cliildren must not eat 
too much, nor take too sweet or too rich food, but 
grown peoj^le may eat what they choose and as 
much as they choose. In other words, we hold up 
to imagination a Mohammedan Paradise where 
" desire shall be sated with flesh, where fruits grow 
low so as to be easily gathered, and where heads 
do not ache from drinking the ever-flowing wine." 
I suspect that such abasement of the ideal is a more 
heinous offense than giving the child the dainties 
which by example we teach him to crave. 

In the suggestions thus far considered, and 
which are given in the Education of Man, there 
is nothing new. They simply embody truths which 
we all confess with our lips and deny in our acts. 
With the Taste Song, however, Froebel becomes 
original, and as the real import of motto, song, and 
commentary unfolds in our minds, we shall become 
aware that they give the point of departure for a 
true aesthetic culture, just as the All-Gone Song 
gave the point of departure for a true moral culture. 

The play itself is a very simple one. The 
mother puts into the child's mouth in succession a 



THE EEVELATION TO SENSE. 175 

plum, a piece of apple, and a bitter almond, and 
leads him to discriminate their several savors. 
Later it maj be varied by calling on him to guess 
and name the fruit from its sweet, sour, or bitter 
taste, and also to name other objects having these 
savors. When he can quickly recognize the qual- 
ity, the mother helps him interpret it. What 
should sweetness tell the child about the sweet 
object? This: that he must not eat too much of 
it. What does sourness tell him? That in many 
cases it is unripe and should not be eaten. What 
does bitterness tell him? That though it puckers 
the mouth it is good for the health. The educa- 
tional points of the game (as you doubtless already 
perceive) are, first, the conscious exercise of the 
power of comparison, and, second, the suggestion 
that all objects have their own language, and in 
their qualities tell us truly what they are. 

It would be folly to suppose that merely from 
detached and occasional plays any lasting influence 
could be expected. But you understand, do you 
not, that each of Froebel's plays initiates a process 
which you are to continue ? The idea in this play is 
to make the sense of taste your ally in forming the 
habit of temperance. The Flower Song is another 



176 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

outcome of tlie same idea, and the two commen- 
taries must be studied together to get Froebel's full 
thought. We err in speaking of our inferior senses 
as enemies to our higher life. Insectivorous plants 
have no senses, yet they often give themselves in- 
digestion and sometimes kill themselves by over- 
feeding. The truth is that in their original and un- 
perverted state taste and smell warn man against the 
very excesses into which superficial thought assumes 
that they betray him. " Taste is an outpost of the 
whole system, for enabling it to assimilate the bene- 
ficial and reject the harmful," and of smell it has 
been well said that " it is placed at the entrance to 
the respiratory organs like a watchman." * How 
many boys w^ould avoid the vice of smoking if they 
interpreted and obeyed the warning given in 
nausea? How many sensuous excesses of all kinds 
would be impossible if men and women heeded the 
deterrent suggestions of languor and faintness? 
How helpful to the child's development might we 
make his senses if we could only teach him in the 
beginning of life to understand their speech and 
hearken to their precepts! 

Be alert, therefore, to notice all Harold's child- 
* Dewey's Psychology, pp. 60-63. 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 177 

ish incontinencies, and to sliow him that you are 
repelled by them. Make him aware and ashamed 
of the indolence which follows upon gluttony. 
Teach him that certain savors are saying to him 
" Eat not," and certain odors " Smell not." Show 
him that the warnings of smell and taste are rein- 
forced by warnings to other senses. Thus the 
apple's greenness and hardness tell the same story 
as its sourness, and the melancholy hues of many 
poisonous plants confirm the suggestion of their 
repellent odors. Impress upon your boy that he 
should consciously use his senses to find out the real 
nature of objects. Quicken in him the assurance 
that no object can be internally different from what 
it shows itself to be in the totality of its attributes, 
and that specific qualities always mean a specific 
type of character. Above all, make him ashamed 
of needing the recurrent experience of bad effects 
to convince him of the evils of indulgence. Hav- 
ing really learned, for example, that sweetness says 
" enjoy moderately," he should never permit him- 
self an immoderate indulgence in sweets. 

You have doubtless noticed that while the Taste 
Song is limited to distinctions of savor, the motto 
suggests the ideal function of all sensation, and 



178 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

the commentary proposes a general plan for train- 
ing the senses. This plan is further illustrated in 
the commentary on the Flower Song, and the two 
commentaries taken together are a frank confession 
of Froebel's idealistic creed, a candid statement of 
its educational implications, and a striking illustra- 
tion of his fidelity to the truths of self-activity and 
freedom. His aim is to make the child master of 
himself. He can not be satisfied with merely giving 
children simple food, but will have them choose it. 
It is not enough for him to restrain children. He 
will have them self -restraining. He is not content 
with even voluntary self-restraint when its motive 
is blind faith in mother or kindergartner, but 
craves for the free soul the self-coercion of an in- 
wardly impelling ideal. Therefore, he will spare no 
pains in teaching the child to compare, discriminate, 
and select, and will daily seek to free him from the 
seductions of appetite by putting in his hands a 
clew to the revelations of sense. 

The training begun by conscious distinctions 
between savors and deliberate refusals to follow ap- 
petite when warned by sense is continued by Froe- 
bel in an attempt to develop a clear consciousness of 
the several sensuous spheres and of the elementary 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 179 

sensations witliin each sphere. As in the Taste 
Song he incites the baby to distinguish the sweet 
from the sour and both from the bitter, so in the 
Flower Song he directs attention to the odors of 
flowers, and seeks to make the child conscious of 
their hortatory and deterrent suggestions. In the 
Finger Piano he teaches us how we may abet the 
natural effort to distinguish sensations of sound, 
while through countless exercises with the kinder- 
garten gifts he stimulates the senses of touch and 
sight by contrasts of pressure, color, form, dimen- 
sion, and position. As soon as there is recognition of 
contrasting extremes, the child is led to notice the 
transitions by which they are connected, and the 
development of his aesthetic sense is begun by 
leading him to choose from among a number of 
forms, colors, and sounds those which he prefers. 
Later he is encouraged to make original combina- 
tions. 

That you may not accuse me of indulging in 
vague generalities let me remind you of Froebel's 
suggestions with regard to the development of the 
color sense. Professor Preyer tells us that most 
color blindness is the result not of organic defect in 
the child, but of neglect on the part of parents. 



180 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

Froebel, as you know, planned to begin education 
in color with the balls of his first gift. The child 
learns, for example, to know blue as that in his sec- 
ond ball which differs from his first, and yellow as 
the something in a third ball which differs from the 
other two. Supplementing this comparison of ob- 
jects alike in all respects save color, should be 
exercises comparing objects different in all respects 
save color. As soon as colors are readily distin- 
guished they are made a basis for classification — 
e. g., the rose is red, the forget-me-not blue, the 
lemon yellow, the grass green. Evidently the 
mother should not classify objects herself, but lead 
the child to classify by asking him to find objects 
like his differently colored balls. When he readily 
recognizes standard colors he may advance to dis- 
crimination of their shades and tints, and from 
this to the formation of color scales. 

Hand in hand with this training in color recog- 
nition goes the use of color in sewing, weaving, in- 
tertwining, coloring pictures of natural objects — 
particularly leaves and flowers, and the employ- 
ment of color in original design, while complement- 
ing the double series of discriminative and produc- 
tive exercises should be the cultivation of taste 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 181 

throiigli beautifully colored natural objects and 
pictures. 

How far we still are from carrying out Froe- 
bel's suggestions I know full well; indeed, I am 
reminding you of tliem with tlie hoj^e tliat both you 
and Helen may be aroused to help in realizing 
his ideal. That something has been achieved, 
however, I realize when I compare the work done 
now with that of twenty years ago. In those early 
days of the kindergarten movement we were told 
that the child should always choose his own colors 
for weaving, sewing, etc., and should combine them 
in any way he wished, and few persons ever thought 
of restricting the range of choice by limiting it to 
permissible combinations. Experience soon showed 
that with such unrestricted freedom the children re- 
mained [esthetic savages, and in a period of reaction 
caused by this discovery many kindergartners tried 
to improve the taste of their pupils'by making se- 
lections for them. After the latter plan had been 
for some time in operation, its results were tested 
by a well-known supervisor who, visiting a large 
number of kindergartens, took with her colors of 
all kinds and asked the children to select and com- 
bine those they liked best. The test proved that the 



182 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

real preferences of the pupils had not been affected 
by the artistic combinations selected for them. At 
present, therefore, the working plan is to offer a 
number of color combinations, all of which are 
good, and allow the children to choose from among 
them. When this plan shall have been perfected 
by the elimination of colors which young children 
can not discriminate, by a proportionate use of the 
several different colors, and by graded exercises in 
combination which shall always hold up to the 
child not some remote perfection, but the near next 
step which he ought to take, this one small phase 
of the problem of assthetic education will be ap- 
proximately solved. 

You have doubtless noticed in the commentary 
to the Flower Song Froebel's statement that in sen- 
sation the vital, intellectual, and moral melt into 
each other, and that it would be difficult to say 
where the purely physical influence of objects 
ends, and where their spiritual influence begins. 
This is no haphazard expression of a fleeting fancy 
but the deliberate record of a conviction. In the 
Education of Man, speaking particularly of colors, 
he affirms that it is by no means their external 
variety which allures the child, but a deep though 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 183 

subconscious desire to enter into the character of 
each color, to understand the relationship between 
different colors, and to obtain with the aid of colors 
an insight into the nature of light. Color and light, 
he adds, are again most intimately connected with 
all that elevates life, because physical light points 
to the heavenly light to which it owes its being and 
existence. 

Vague and dangerous mysticism, says the critic 
of Froebel. Yague it may be, dangerous it can not 
be, since Froebel asks us to do nothing but give the 
child a careful training in the recognition and use 
of color. He surely does not mean us to talk about 
the symbolism of color. If color has any psychic 
influence it will make itself felt without our aid. 
Indeed, our speaking of it or of any other symbol 
would be a profanation of that self-revealing mys- 
tery in which the nature of a symbol consists. So 
those who accept and those who reject symbolism 
may peacefully pursue the same practical path. 

If, however, you will recall the part played by 
the symbolism of color in sacred and legendary art 
you will, I think, admit that notwithstanding its 
artificiality it points to an obscure presentiment of 
the truth that each color has its spiritual corre- 



184 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

spondence, and exercises some psjeliic influence. 
So while putting far away from you all conven- 
tional symbols, ask yourself if you do not recognize 
in different colors tlie fit expression of different 
feelings, ideas, and tyj)es of character. When you 
read of Mary, Queen of Scots, preparing for execu- 
tion by attiring herself in a dress of gleaming red, 
does it predispose you to believe that her church 
has been wise in her canonization? Can you pic- 
ture the scarlet woman of Revelation clad in white ? 
Can you disrobe Raphael's Madonnas of their ceru- 
lean garments, or imagine any background which 
would so enhance their spiritual beauty as the 
golden light he chooses? Do you find no signifi- 
cance in the fact that Mature meets our uplifted 
gaze with blue sky and golden sun, while she 
spreads beneath us expanses of aspiring green and 
work-a-day brown, and uses her passionate reds only 
in the occasional flower and the rare jewel, in the 
vanishing pomps of autumn and the dissolving 
splendors of sunset and sunrise? 

The theory of color which best explains these 
spiritual intuitions is that of Goethe. He suggests 
that all color arises through the reciprocal relation 
of light and darkness. White light seen through a 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 185 

medium tliat slightly dims it appears yellow. 
Darker or denser mediums cause it to appear or- 
ange or red. Conversely, darkness seen through a 
strongly illuminated medium becomes light blue 
in color, while seen through less illuminated me- 
diums it appears indigo or violet. The remaining 
color, green, is produced by a process which 
"mingles light blue with light yellow, the former 
being seen through the latter. According to this 
theory yellow and light blue are the most noble 
colors, the one being the nearest approximation in 
color to pure light, the other being the highest 
illumination of darkness. The former would there- 
fore correspond with the revelation of eternal truth 
and beauty, the latter with the illumination of all 
the mysteries of ignorance, sin, and sorrow. Red 
would suggest the premonitions of truth and beauty 
in feeling, which just because it is obscure is often 
passionate and evil. Yiolet would be the color of 
mystery, while the origin of green hints that it is 
the symbolic equivalent of hope and aspiration. As 
a whole this theory confirms our faith that each sen- 
suous incitement has its spiritual correspondence, 
justifies the procedure of great artists, and awakens 
in our minds a suspicion that through her wisely 



186 



LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 



distributed colors loving ISTature is seeking to stir 
our souls in proportionate measure with passion, 
aspiration, and faith.* 

While color is a universal quality of material 
things it is not a quality effective of distinction. 
Classification upon the basis of color is necessarily 
arbitrary. By it we can neither determine classes 



* In his Larger Psychology (vol. ii, pp. 379, 380), Professor 
James writes as follows: " The dynamogenic value of colored 



No. 1. 




lights varies with the color. In a 
subject whose normal strength was 
expressed by 23, it became 24 when 
a blue light was thrown upon the 
eyes, 28 for green, 30 for yellow, 35 
for orange, and 42 for red. Red is 
thus the most exciting color." 

Of the accompanying cuts which I 
borrow from Professor James, No. 1 
" shows the way in which the pulse 
of one subject was raodiiied by the 
exhibition of a red light lasting from 
the moment marked a to that marked 
b," No. 2 " shows the effects of light 
upon the breathing of two hysteric 
patients." 



No. 3. 




Respiratory curve of 
No. 2 : a, with yellow 
light ; 6, with green 
light ; c, with red 
light. The red has 
the strongest effect. 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 1S7 

nor satisfactorily distinguish different objects, for 
objects of the same class may have different colors, 
objects of different classes may have the same colors, 
and objects may change their color without los- 
ing their identity. 
--,,,.^^ The distinctive characteristic of material objects 
is form. We may have a red sphere and a red cube, 
but the sphere can not lose its curve nor the cube 
its angles without ceasing to be itself. " An oak," 
says Ruskin, " is an oak whether green with spring 
or red with winter; a dahlia is a dahlia whether it 
be yellow or crimson, and if some monster-hunting 
botanist should ever frighten the flower blue still it 
will be a dahlia; but let one curve of the petals, 
one groove of the stamens, be wanting, and the 
flower ceases to be the same." Since form is the 
mark of specific variety it was natural that Froebel 
should emphasize this quality in his gifts, and since 
geometrical figures are the archetypes of form it 
was inevitable that he should use them as the clew 
to all other forms. Yet it is precisely in this feature 
of his method that his critics are finding his worst 
mistakes. Their attack reduces itself upon inves- 
tigation to two points : first, that it is a psychologic 

error to " divert the tendency of the child to com- 
14 



188 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

pare concrete objects with each other and prompt 
rather the comparison of type forms with indi- 
viduals; " * second, that geometric forms are not 
beautiful, and that occupation with them gives no 
aesthetic culture. In reply to the first objection 
may be urged the fact that the very first valid com- 
parison be ween two concrete objects must elicit the 
type form which underlies each, and that it is easier 
for the mind to make such comparison if the type 
form be known. The second objection loses much 
of its weight when we reflect that standards of 
beauty must vary for the child and the man, and 
that aesthetic education must seek the level on 
which the pupil stands, and allure him gradually 
to higher planes. In Xature crystallization pre- 
cedes organic life; in history architecture precedes 
all other arts ; in childhood the passion for building 
is lively and strong. Again, man's first aesthetic 
preferences were for simple regularity of form and 
the early monuments of architecture tended to 
assume crystalline shajics, as is shown in Egyptian 
pyramids and obelisks. Winckelmann relates that 
among the remains of primitive sculpture are three 

* Relation of the Kindergarten to the Primary School, C. 
C. Van Liew, Educational Review, February, 1895, p. 180. 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 189 

large cubes inscribed with tlie names of the three 
Graces, and Froebel's allusion to this statement of 
the great Greek born out of due time shows that 
it was to him a pregnant suggestion of educational 
method. In like manner artistic design began with 
regularly repeated lines and figures, and only gradu- 
ally advanced to reproduction of the freer beauty 
of natural forms. Add to these suggestions the 
fact that the gifts, as we have them, omit the divided 
spheres, cylinders, and cones which are integral 
members of Froebel's ideal series of typical play- 
things, and which correct the undue accent upon 
rectangular planes and solids, and it seems to me 
most of the objections against his plan are satisfac- 
torily disposed of, especially if due recognition is 
accorded his tireless hrgency in recommending the 
collection of simple and beautiful natural objects, 
and their reproduction in modelling, drawing, and 
painting exercises. 

Of Froebel's faith in the spiritual analogies of 
form there can be no doubt, but it is the grossest 
caricature of his method to affirm that he thrusts 
these analogies upon the child. Correspondences 
make themselves felt, and all that Froebel or any 
one of his rational disciples claims is that the soul of 



190 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

man rejoices in the lower analogues of its own activi- 
ties, though it has no understanding whatever of 
the secret of its joy. The sequence of the kinder- 
garten gifts is determined by Froebel's perception 
that force is an energy which tends to act equally in 
all directions and that the material resultant of this 
tendency is the sphere. Crystal forms show a pro- 
gressive approximation to the spherical type, or, in 
other words, move toward concrete realization of 
the original spherical tendency of force. In like 
manner, human development makes explicit what is 
always implicit in mind. All development is self- 
duplication, and the series of crystal forms is an 
inorganic analogue of mind just as the process of 
plant life moving from seed to seed is its organic 
analogue. It is easy to scoff at Froebel's insight 
and to ridicule the educational claim he bases upon 
it, but when one remembers how primitive men 
sought revelations of their own spiritual nature in 
the alternations of day and night, in the phases of 
the moon and the seasons of the year, in generative 
processes, planetary orbits and stellar revolutions, 
one is inclined to suspect that the final victory will 
be with the founder of the kindergarten and not 
with the scoffers who lightly sneer at his mysticism. 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 191 

To explain in a single letter how the forms of 
the kindergarten may be used to stimulate and 
develop the sense of touch is obviously impossible. 
For you, moreover, it is unnecessary, as you have 
had two years of kindergarten training and my ob- 
ject is simply to remind you of the general prin- 
ciples involved in Froebelian exercises. I shall 
therefore leave you to expand the recommendations 
I have made with regard to exercises in form and 
hasten to suggest how you may help Harold to 
notice and discriminate sensations of sound. In the 
view of experimental psychologists no child whose 
organ of hearing is normally developed is born 
absolutely unmusical. The inability of many chil- 
dren to distinguish musical tones is, therefore, 
probably due to lack of exercise. You will remem- 
ber that Froebel urges mothers to sing much them- 
selves; to encourage children to sing; to call their 
attention to differences of rhythm ; to incite them to 
distinguish between musical tones, and encourage 
them to originate little melodies. It is, however, 
important that the discrimination of musical tones 
and the composition of melodies should not be be- 
gun too early or carried too far, and I think Froe- 
bel's most valuable suggestions with regard to the 



192 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

training of tlie auditory sense are contained in tlie 
commentary to the Finger Piano, whose central 
thought is that the best way to cultivate the hearing 
of little children is by directing attention to the 
sounds of Nature. Jenny Lind began her own 
training as a singer by imitating the songs of birds. 
Think of the pleasure you may give Harold by 
leading him to notice and imitate the crowing of 
roosters, the quacking of ducks, the bleating of 
lambs, the chirping of crickets, the humming of 
bees. Think of the joy which will come to him as 
he learns to distinguish the notes of the robin, the 
oriole, the meadow lark, the song sparrow. Think 
of the spiritual presentiments you may awaken by 
teaching him to hearken to the voices of the wind, 
and distinguish its whispers, sighs, and moans, its 
whistles, songs, and trumpet blasts; and, once 
again, forget not the poetic analogies which will 
rise unbidden in his soul as he listens to the almost 
articulate babble of playful brooks, to the gentle 
plash of waves, to the solemn music of the sea. 

In the kindergarten the musical education be- 
gun by ]^ature is continued by song and the adap- 
tation of movement to different rhythms. The 
careful selection of melodies is of the highest im- 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 193 

portance, for whatever view may be finally adopted 
with regard to the spiritual incitement of form and 
color, few persons question the truth that there 
is a direct relation between music and emotion, and 
that base or noble feelings may be aroused by cor- 
respondent melodies and rhythms. Plato banished 
from his ideal Republic all strains " save the strain 
of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain 
of the unfortimate and the strain of the fortunate, 
the strain of courage and the strain of temperance." 
Our ideal for the child is that he should learn only 
those melodies and rhythms which express freedom, 
joy, and that serene possession of the total self 
which Froebel expresses in the phrase inner col- 
lectedness. I do not claim that this ideal is realized, 
but its assertion and definition insure its embodi- 
ment. 

Comparing Froebel's suggestions with regard 
to sense training with those of more recent writers, 
we are struck by the fact that while he was the 
first educator who sought to give a heightened 
energy to the earliest motions of consciousness by 
isolating, contrasting, and thus accentuating ele- 
mentary sensations, he was also keenly alive to the 
dangers of exaggerating such training, and thereby 



194 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

impeding the development of liiglier mental activi- 
ties.* Thus, within the sphere of taste Froebel is 
content to have the child distinguish sweet, sour, 
and bitter, while in a recent popular psychology we 
find a list of forty-six edibles between which we are 
told tlie blindfold pupil should learn to discrimi- 
nate, f Froebel limits his training of the sense of 

* Education of the Central Nervous System, Halleck, p. 
143. 

f It may be said that the priority I claim for Proebel be- 
longs of right to Pestalozzi. Those who incline to this opin- 
ion may profitably consider the suggestions of the latter edu- 
cator as given in How Gertrude Teaches her Children. 

"In reference to such objects as we recognize immediately 
by the five senses, and in reference to which it is necessary to 
teach the child to express himself with precision, I take from 
a dictionary substances whose most prominent qualities we 
can distinguish by the five senses, and put down with them 
the adjectives which describe those qualities, e. g., 

" Eel — slippery, worm-shaped, tough-skinned. 

" Carcass — dead, offensive. 

" Evening — quiet, cheerful, cool, rainy. 

"Axle — strong, weak, greasy. 

"Field — sandy, clayey, sowed, manured, fertile, profitable, 
unprofitable. 

" Then I reverse this proceeding and in the same way select 
from the dictionary adjectives expressing distinguishing quali- 
ties of objects recognized by the five senses, and set down 
after them the names of objects possessing them, e. g., 

" Round — ball, hat, moon, sun. 

"Light — feather, down, air. 

" Heavy — gold, lead, oak, wood. 

" Hot — oven, summer day, fire. 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 195 

smell to a recognition of tlie odors of common 
flowers, while his predecessor, Pestalozzi, and his 
successors among the physiological psychologists 
assail the nostrils of infancy with a bewildering 
variety of perfumes and stenches. Finally, Froebel 

"High — tower, mountain, giants, trees. 

" Deep — oceans, seas, cellars, graves. 

" Soft — flesh, wax, butter. 

" Elastic — steel springs, whalebone. 

" I do not endeavor by completing these explanatory suffixes 
to diminish the field of the child's independent intellectual 
activity, but only give a few terms calculated to appeal di- 
rectly to his senses, and then inquire in continuation, What 
else can you mention of the same sort ? " 

The most cursory examination of the procedure suggested 
in this extract shows that Pestalozzi's object lessons are not 
exercises in the discrimination of elementary sensations. The 
defects of his plan are many and grave. It makes no selec- 
tion of objects, but allows the child to consider indifferently 
an eel or a carcass. It applies to these non-selective objects 
adjectives with which the child is unfamiliar, and hence bur- 
dens his mind with unintelligible predicates. When, reversing 
its procedure, it gives qualities and calls upon the child to name 
objects possessing them, it fails to prepare him for so doing 
by first acquainting him with the qualities under which ob- 
jects are to be subsumed. Again, it does not select element- 
ary qualities, and it fails entirely to call for a conscious dis- 
crimination between the several sensuous spheres. Above all, 
it is oblivious of the hortatory and deterrent aspects of sen- 
sation, and therefore suggests no deed as the outcome of its 
distinctions. Hence it has no moral or {esthetic quality, and, 
furthermore, by " burdening memory with unintelligible epi- 
thets, it really obscures the intellect and plunges the pu^jil 
into the chaos from which it claims to deliver him." 



196 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

asks the young cliild to discriminate a few typical 
forms, a few elementary colors, a few simple musi- 
cal tones, and reserves all more delicate distinctions 
for a maturer age. How different is his practice 
from that now recommended you will realize when 
you read the following passage, which I cite be- 
cause it states explicitly a plan often less frankly 
advocated : 

" In the first stage of brain-building — the sen- 
sation stage — the child should as early in life as 
possible be caused to discriminate between each rec- 
ognizable difference of color — pitch, hue, tint, and 
shade — and all the other color pitches, hues, tints, 
and shades; and to discriminate between each recog- 
nizable difference of sound pitch, amplitude, tone- 
quality, cadence, melodic succession, and chordal 
synthesis, and every other sound pitch, amplitude, 
tone-quality, etc. ; and to discriminate between each 
recognizable difference of pleasurable and healthful 
taste, and every other one; and to discriminate be- 
tween each recognizable difference of healthful 
smells, and each other smell; to discriminate in a 
similar manner between touches; in their recogniz- 
able differences of intensity and locality and com- 
parative closeness; and the same for warm-tem- 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 197 

perature sensations, and for cold-temperature sen- 
sations; and the same for muscular sensations, until 
each muscle has been felt to move with different 
degrees of energy and speed and in different direc- 
tions. Briefly, give to the child every sensation- 
memory-structure that it can get from each of the 
eight classes of sensory nerves, omitting not one 
recognizable sensation-difference in any of the 
senses." * 

The greater temperance of Froebel is due to 
his clearer recognition of the nature and signifi- 
cance of the higher mental activities. The training 
of sense is urged wpon the ground that the brain 
structures are the products of mental activity, and 
that, therefore, in order to build up the different 
sense areas the child must exercise the functions 
of which those areas are the embodied expression. 
But if this be true of the structures resulting from 
the exercise of sense perception it is obviously no 
less true of the cells and fibers in which are regis- 
tered the results of higher activities; and to exag- 
gerate sense training is to keep the soul the thrall 
of environment instead of abetting the struggle for 

* Psychology, Psychurgy. and the Kindergarten. By 
Elmer Gates, M. D., JPratt Institute Monthly, May, 1897. 



198 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

liberty it makes in its search for causes. Since 
causes belong to a higher order than the objects 
of sense-perception, the soul emancipates itself 
from those dead results and achieves freedom by 
becoming self-environing. Might it not be pos- 
sible, by too many exercises in seeing, hearing, 
touching, tasting, and smelling to bind the child's 
soul throughout life to his eyes, ears, hands, mouth, 
and nose? And if such exercises were continued 
for a sufficient number of generations might they 
not threaten the human race with reversion to 
the animal brain as a result of the exercise of 
animal activities? Laugh, dear friend, if you 
will, but learn the trend of certain educational 
suggestions from the absurdity of their logical out- 
come. 

Have I made clear to you what you ought prac- 
tically to do in order to begin Harold's aesthetic 
education? Have I helped you to realize that all 
Nature is speech, and that the universal qualities 
of objects are the alphabet through whose countless 
combinations we spell out her meaning? Have I 
shown you that discriminative and productive exer- 
cises must go hand in hand, and that we can only 
learn to love the beautiful by creating the beauti- 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 199 

ful? Have I convinced you that standards of 
beauty must vary for the adult and the child, and 
that any effort to make the latter apj)reciate the 
higher forms of beauty must be self-defeating? If 
so, you now realize that the rounds on the ladder of 
aesthetic development are permanent, but that they 
may be climbed more or less rapidly; and that our 
wisdom consists in seeing where the child stands 
and then pointing him, not to the distant height to 
which he must mount, but to the near next step 
which he must take and perhaps already begins to 
feel he would like to take. Historically, as Goethe 
hints to us in his portrayal of the relationship be- 
tween Phorkyas and Helen, the beautiful arose by 
a progressive transformation of the ugly, and the 
love of beauty must be cultivated in the same way. 
Learning to like the less ugly means learning to 
like the more beautiful, and as we achieve virtue 
by overcoming moral defect, so we achieve good 
taste by overcoming bad taste. How many persons 
blandly unconscious of their own lack of relish for 
the highest art go through life formally professing 
admiration for all that custom has sanctioned as 
admirable! How many vital but uncouth natures 
defiantly assert their own savage predilections! 



200 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

How many fawning hypocrites praise tlie beautiful 
while inwardly gloating over the ugly. Would 
you save Harold from becoming an aesthetic for- 
malist, scoffer, or hypocrite ? Then see to it that you 
respect the ratio between production and discrim- 
ination! 

In addition to the positive training of discrim- 
ination and production, we must be mindful of the 
influence of environment, and careful not to pervert 
the child's aesthetic sense by ugly pictures and ugly 
toys. The taste of little girls is often corrupted by 
expressionless dolls, badly painted and badly 
dressed. The musical taste of boys is coarsened by 
tin trumpets and poor drums. Many children are 
allowed to bang on the piano. Many are injured by 
all kinds of ugly and tawdry playthings, and by 
badly drawn and crudely colored pictures. Last, 
but not least, we forget that all true beauty im- 
plies strength and simplicity, and warp the taste of 
children by the excessive luxury of our homes. 

As the kindergarten gifts seek the original point 
of contact between the mind of the child and the 
beauties of ISTature and art, so the songs of the 
Mother-Play nourish the germs of literary activity 
and literary taste. Always alert to discover the 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 201 

terminus ah quo of an educational process, Froebel 
perceived tliat latent in our traditional nursery 
rhymes were the ideals wliicL. liave created higher 
literature, and considered as a child's book the 
Mother-Play is an attempt to elicit these ideals, and 
by means of dramatic action, poetry, music, picture, 
and story, to win for them a controlling power over 
the imagination. In these plays the child is both 
receptive and self-expressive, but as he grows older 
the development of literary activity and the cul- 
tivation of literary taste must be pursued by dis- 
tinct but parallel paths. Children should be en- 
couraged to relate their experiences, and thus begin 
to grasp them as wholes. They should be taught 
to give accurate descriptions of simple and beautiful 
objects, to make rhymes and relate original stories, 
and as they grow older written expression should 
supplement oral expression. On the other hand, 
literary taste should be cultivated by hearing and 
reading carefully selected poems and stories, and 
simple poems, whose rhythm is as perfect as pos- 
sible, and which embody pure and inspiring ideals, 
should be committed to memory. 

In selecting stories for little children we should 
be careful to keep a just proportion between the 



202 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

several types into which they naturally divide them- 
selves. The child needs stories reflecting accu- 
rately his own experiences, and thus acting as a 
looking-glass for his mind. He needs those narra- 
tives of animal and plant life and those narrative 
descriptions of inorganic phenomena which open for 
him the doorway of natural science. He needs 
stories interpreting human nature as he begins to 
know it — stories which depict in strong and simple 
outline the elemental emotions, the primary mo- 
tives, and the original moral conflicts of the soul. 
Above all, he needs those mythic tales which " sport 
with the fixed conditions of the actual world and 
present to him a picture of free power over ^Nature 
and circumstances." For tales such as these liberate 
the soul because they celebrate its ideal freedom 
and prophesy its triumphant career of conquest 
over itself and the world. 

For American children stories of this kind are 
especially important because as a people we are 
prosaic, and as Matthew Arnold has frankly told us, 
" not interesting." The tendency of much so-called 
education is to kill what little ideality we have. 
The thoroughness with which we study mathemat- 
ics and natural science, while neglecting literature, 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 203 

history, art, and philosopliy, tends to enthrall rather 
than to emancipate .our minds, and I honestly be- 
lieve that not only our individual characters, but 
our perpetuity as a representative nation depends 
ujDon the uplifting of our ideals through the cul- 
tivation of imagination. So " give us once again 
the wishing cup of Fortunatus and the invisible coat 
of Jack the Giant-Killer," and do you contribute 
your share toward the evolution of a nation of ideal- 
ists by telling Harold over and over again the fairy 
tales you may be sure he will never tire of hearing. 
Casting a backward glance over the course of 
this letter you will become aware that it has un- 
folded from the simple point made by Froebel that 
through their savor, odor, sound, form, and color the 
things of ISTature speak to us and tell us what they 
are. This insight explains our analogical use of 
the words originally expressive of elementary sensa- 
tions. Sweet dispositions, sour faces, bitter ex- 
periences, fragrant memories, angular character, the 
circular sweep of deeds, the spirals of thought, the 
ring of truth, the pitch and scale of feeling, the 
many words borrowed from the vocabulary of color 
to suggest emotion are all intimations that we have 

been blindly aware that in sensation is revealed the 
15 



204 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

true being of the sensuous object. Still more sug- 
gestive is our discernment of spiritual analogues to 
the different sensuous spheres, and particularly our 
wide reaching analogical use of the word taste. We 
speak of taste in dress, manner, life, art, and litera- 
ture; we praise the man of correct and refined 
taste, we shrink from him whose tastes are low. 
The several uses of the word have this in common, 
that they all imply the act of comparison. Cultiva- 
tion in any sphere is characterized by the sensitive 
apprehension of subtle differences. The musician 
hears sounds not discernible by the untrained ear, 
the sculptor perceives gradations of form, the 
painted gradations of color invisible to the unedu- 
cated eye; all three recognize in the several forms 
of expression a soul hidden from or vaguely appre- 
hended by dimmer eyes and duller ears. Such rec- 
ognition implies an identity of the essence or 
soul of the object with the soul of the percipient. 
Physically we taste only that which we are begin- 
ning to assimilate or make over into our own or- 
ganism, and the same is true sj)iritually. Our tastes 
therefore indicate our spiritual affiliations, and our 
souls are becoming noble or base, fair or foul, as we 
prefer the noble or base, the fair or foul in life, 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 205 

manners, literature, and art. We grow into tlie 
likeness of tlie things we love, and our genuine at- 
tractions and repulsions define our characters. 
[Realize this truth and you will understand that the 
cultivation of taste is one important phase of edu- 
cation, and will inquire for suggestions as to the 
ways and means of leading children to love the 
sweet, the beautiful, and the reasonable. 

If it be true that through their qualities the 
things of Nature reveal their essence, then Nature 
is a revelation to sense of the invisible realities of 
spirit. Of all delusions the most fatal is that which 
holds to the contradiction of inner and outer, and 
imagines that the essence of things can be different 
in character from their manifestation. How often 
are being and seeming set in sharp contrast! how 
fondly do we hug the conceit that we are something 
better, nobler, purer than we appear ! Once for all 
sweep that illusion away. What we act we are, and 
our lives are the revelation of our souls. So is it 
also with iSTature. She is that which she appears to 
be, and as we study history we find that to men of 
all ages and races she has told the truth about her- 
self. It was she who by her setting suns, her fading 
flowers, her dying animals wakened in the soul a 



206 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

consciousness of tlie transitoriness of all finite thing's 
and stirred the longing for something which would 
not pass away. It was she who held up before man 
his own image as conquering hero and returning 
wanderer. It is she who in these later days is tell- 
ing to all who have ears to hear that she is mind 
manifest. The revelation is clear, but the eyes of 
men have waxed gross and their ears are dull of 
hearing. Therefore the great revelation needs its 
interpreters. Best of these are the poets and artists, 
and the shortest definition of aesthetic education is 
that it is the process by which the intuitions and 
affections of elect souls are made the intuitions and 
affections of all souls. 

It is universally conceded that Greece is the 
fatherland of literature and art, but many of us do 
not connect this distinction with the fact tliat in 
fair Hellas men first began to inquire in the depths 
of their own souls for the hidden meaning of ]^a- 
ture. " The Greek spirit," says Hegel, " regards 
Nature as something foreign to itself, in which, 
however, there is something friendly to itself. Its 
attitude toward N'ature is one of wonder and pre- 
sentiment, of curious surmise and eager attention. 
It looks upon ISTature as incitement, and in the emo- 



THE REVELATION TO SENSE. 207 

tions and ideals incited discovers the spiritual real- 
ity behind appearance. The Greek Pan is not the 
objective whole of JSTature, but the subjective thrill 
in the presence of Nature. Naiads and muses are 
not fountains, but the exaltation of spirit awakened 
by the murmur of fountains. The oracles of sacred 
oaks are not their rustling leaves, but the imj)ulses 
and dreams they stir in the susceptible soul. In a 
word, in the recoil of spirit against the incitement 
of Nature is revealed the character of the incite- 
ment itself." * 

And now, dear friend, if Nature be indeed 
speech, who is the speaker? Since we can interpret 
her must we not resemble her? Since we can only 
interpret her by looking within our own souls must 
there be a spirit in her like the spirit in us? May 
it really be as the Schoolmen taught, that in every 
object of sensitive experience God himself lies hid? 
And as His revelation to sense was first in the his- 
tory of the world must it not be the first to appeal 
to the individual? Since literature, art, and religion 
are the fair issue of a marriage between Nature and 
the human mind, should not the sacramental union 
be formed anew by each fresh soul? You read my 
* Hegel's Philosophy of History, Eng. tr., pp. 244^246. 



208 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

meaning? Tcaeli Harold to love Nature, to enjoy 
her beauty, wonder at lier mystery, feel lier living 
companionship. So shall the pulsations of his 
thought move in rhythm with the eternal stream of 
spiritual energy; so shall his soul become inwardly 
one with the Infinite spirit who " from the shining 
fount of life pours the deluge of creation." 



LETTER VII. 

THE SOUL OF THE FLOWER. 

FLOWER SONG. 

The Life Supreme, that lives in all, 

Gives everything its own ; 
A soul remains itself despite 
Life's ceaseless shift-Death's sure, cold might 

Jtee//— though changed or grown. 

And something to a soul akin 

Looks out from every flower ; 
A lily is a lily still. 
On mountain bleak, by meadow rill, 

In sunshine or in shower. 
Ten thousand roses June may boast, 

All difl'ering each from each ; 
And still the rose-soul in each one 
Glows fervent, as if there alone 

Its silence had found speech. 

Henrietta E. Eliot. 

FRAGRANT FLOWERS. 

Oh ! the pretty flowers ! 

Well their names we know. 
When we see their colors 

That so brightly glow. 

All these pretty flowers 

Have their own sweet smell. 
Often without seeing 

We their names can tell. 



210 ' LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

So our eyes we cover 

That we may not see ; 
While the fnigniuce tells us 

What the flower must be.* 

Hilda's eyes we cover 

That she may not see ; 
While the fragrance tells her 

What the flower must be. 

Emilie Poulsson. 

Dear : For years I have watclied witli 

anxiety tlie increasing number of books whose ob- 
ject is to kindle in the heart of childhood a passion 
for natural science. For years I have realized with 
dismay that in order to make time for exercises in 
botany, natural history, and elementary physics kin- 
dergartners were sacrificing the ideal of creative 
self-activity, and quietly ignoring those distinctive- 
ly Froebelian games which stir presentiments of 
social solidarity and spiritual freedom. In the mind 
of any one who recognizes that the realm of Nature 
is a realm of fate, and that the exclusive or prepon- 
derant study of natural science must create an intel- 
lectual bias toward fatalism, the undue emphasis so 
often placed upon science can not fail to rouse a pro- 
test. The teaching of science is that Nature is an 

* After singing three stanzas to introduce the play, the 
last stanza only is repeated, as different children try to distin- 
guish the flowers. Each child's name may be used. 



THE SOUL OF THE FLOWER. 211 

unbroken chain of plienomena in wliicli every link 
is determined by that which preceded it. The su- 
preme and exhilarating fact about man is that his 
soul is a fathomless spring of creative energy. We 
are tokl that each grain of sand on the seashore lies 
where it does because the whole past history of the 
world and the totality of present conditions have 
conspired to place and keep it there. But here 
comes the baby just two years old and, scouting and 
flouting all past and present causality, insists that 
he is himself an original causal energy. ISTo sum 
total of antecedent or present influences shall con- 
strain him. He has discerned in ]S[ature an ideal jdos- 
sibility, and, victor that he is, plants his foot upon 
her neck. He wants a hollow where now is a level, or 
a sand mountain where now is a hollow. And what 
he wants he makes, thereby asserting his transcen- 
dental freedom and enacting on his Lilliputian scale 
one scene in the splendid drama of human conquest. 
Because man is free and nature unfree the 
young mind should not be warped by too early or 
too exclusive stress upon the study of natural sci- 
ence. So beware of the temptation to make 
Harold a prodigy of informations with regard to 
plants and animals, and warn Helen against com- 



212 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

mitting a like wrong against the children in her 
kindergarten. 

I am well aware that of late years science has 
sought in plants and animals for the embryonic 
forms of mental activity, and that many of her 
leaders are beginning to recognize in the ascent of 
life a struggle toward freedom. IsText to their too 
great frequency the most serious criticism to be 
made upon the talks about plants and animals given 
to little children is that they generally show no 
knowledge of the significant results at which recent 
science has arrived. So, having warned you against 
too much flower study, my object in this letter will 
be to suggest to you how you may help Harold to 
discover the soul of the flower. 

You wrote me some time ago that you were 
reading The I^aturalist on the River Amazon, and 
I am sure you can not have forgotten the descrip- 
tion of a parasitic tree which grows in the neighbor- 
hood of Para, and which is called the matador or 
murderer. " It belongs to the fig order. The 
base of its stem would be unable to bear the weight 
of the upper growth; it is obliged, therefore, to 
support itself on a tree of another species. In this 
it is not essentially different from other climbing 



THE SOUL OF THE FLOWER. 213 

j)lants and trees, but the way the matador sets about 
it is peculiar, and produces certainly a disagreeable 
impression. It springs up close to the tree on which 
it intends to fix itself, and the wood of its stem 
grows by spreading itself like a plastic mold over 
one side of the trunk of its supporter. It then puts 
forth from each side an arm-like branch, which 
grows rapidly, and looks as though a stream of sap 
were flowing and hardening as it went. This ad- 
heres closely to the trunk of the victim, and the 
two arms meet on the opposite side and blend to- 
gether. These arms are jDut forth at somewhat regu- 
lar intervals in mounting upward, and the victim, 
when the strangler is full grown, becomes tightly 
clasped by a number of inflexible rings. These rings 
gradually grow larger as the murderer flourishes, 
rearing its crown of foliage to the sky mingled with 
that of its neighbor, and in course of time they kill it 
by stopping the flow of its sap. The strange spec- 
tacle then remains of the selfish parasite clasping in 
its arms the lifeless and decaying body of its victim, 
which had been a help to its own growth! " * 

With this striking example of vegetable crime 

* The Naturalist on the River Amazon, H. W. Bates ; 
cited in Sagacity and Morality of Plants, J. E. Taylor, p. 239. 



214 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

compare the following touching illustration of 
vegetable suffering and resignation, and that you 
may appreciate its significance remember that there 
is a direct relation between the adequacy of food 
supply and the production of leaves. 

" No genuine botanist," writes Mr. J. E. Tay- 
lor, " can regard that remarkable and unique Brit- 
ish plant, the butcher's broom, with other than 
intense interest. It is the only species of woody 
monocotyledonous plant we have in England — the 
only representative of the woody-stemmed palms, 
etc., of the tropics submissively growing beneath 
the shade of trees which came into existence ages 
after its own family had occupied the proud posi- 
tion of aristocrats in the vegetable world. What a 
story of quiet suffering and struggling with these 
plutocratic newcomers does the fact that the butch- 
er's broom has no leaves, but only cladodes, tell 
us! Leaves with it have long since disappeared. 
Profitable as they usually are, the plant could not 
make ends meet, and so the branches flattened them- 
selves, became covered with stomata (or carbon- 
feeding mouths), and performed, and do still per- 
form, all the functions of true leaves." * 
* Sagacity and Morality of Plants, J. E. Taylor, p. 42, 43. 



THE SOUL OF THE FLOWER. 215 

Were we considering linnian condnct instead 
of plant conduct, I think you would admit that the 
matador and the butcher's broom have very differ- 
ent characters, and should I give a thousand illustra- 
tions instead of two you would be convinced that 
all human virtues and vices have their counterparts 
in the actions of the vegetable kingdom. Contrast 
the characters of trees and vines as shown in the 
methods they have adopted to get heat, light, and 
food. I am writing this letter out of doors. Just 
in front of my porch stands a giant oak. I think 
of the strength and patience which built up its 
huge trunk, spread its branches high in air, and 
hung its leaves in the sunshine and breeze. Then I 
look at the clematis and wisteria clambering over 
rails, twining around pillars, and realize that wit 
and cunning have stood them in the stead of 
strength. Consider the varying types of individu- 
ality manifested in the devices originated by plants 
to secure cross fertilization; in the differing and 
often contradictory plans adopted for the disper- 
sion of seed ; in the honesty with which some plants 
requite the services rendered by birds and insects; 
in the selfishness and cruelty with which others turn 
upon their benefactors. Remember the cunning and 



216 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

treachery with which insectivorous plants tempt, 
deceive, betray, and destroy their victims. Com- 
pare the sj)ecies of phmts that live by parasitism and 
robbery Avith the nobler and wiser sjDecies that have 
learned to apply the principle of co-operation, and 
which by civilization have made themselves victors 
in the fierce and never-ending battle for life. Pon- 
der the hint conveyed in Mr. Darwin's admission 
that we do not know " why a touch, slight pressurej 
or any other irritant such as electricity, heat, or the 
absorption of animal matter should modify the tur- 
gescence of the affected cells in such a manner as 
to cause movement," and in his far-reaching sug- 
gestion that "the tip of the radicle acts like the brain 
of one of the lower animals." * Finally, ask your- 
self what it means when competent botanists can 
speak of the likes and dislikes of plants, their ten- 
dencies and habits, and of floral sagacity, morality, 

* Power of Movement in Plants. "The course pursiied 
by the radicle in penetrating the ground must be determined 
by the tip, hence it has acquired such diverse kinds of sensi- 
tiveness. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of 
the radicle thus endowed, and having the power of directing 
the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of 
one of the lower animals, the brain being seated within the 
anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense 
organs, and directing the several movements. " 



TBE SOUL OP THE FLOWER. 217 

aud dii:»lomacj. All these facts point in one direc- 
tion and suggest one truth. AVherever there is life 
there is self-determination, and where there is self- 
determination there is mind or soul. 

When the facts of science force us to confront 
this possibility we become suddenly aware that it 
has long hovered before poetic and philosophic 
minds. " It is my faith," confesses Wordsworth, 
" that every flower enjoys the air it breathes." 
Lowell knows of an instinct in the clod which " feels 
a stir of might and climbs to a soul in grass and 
flowers." To Longfellow " Flowers teach by most 
j)ersuasive reasons how akin they are to human 
things." Emerson hears " The poor grass plot 
and plan what it will do when it is man; " 
George Eliot feels that " There is a soul beyond 
utterance, half nymph, half child, in the delicate 
petals which glow and breathe about the centers 
of deep color; " and Spencer has insight into the 
truth that all bodies are the product of souls. 

"For of the soule the bodie forme doth take, 
For soule is forme and doth the bodie make." 

It may be claimed that poets suggest thoughts 
they themselves do not fully apprehend. If so I 
appeal from poetry to philosophy, and remind you 



218 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

of Aristotle's celebrated discrimination between 
vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls. We empty 
bis discrimination of all meaning by practically 
denying any soul to plants and animals. Great 
thoughts imply great thinkers, and they undergo 
a sad shrinkage when they enter little minds. 
We should be wiser if we recognized that in 
proportion as a thinker is great he means exactly 
what he says, and if, instead of dwarfing his 
thoughts to our mental dimensions, we should seek 
to expand our dimensions to the measure of his 
thought. 

What, then, in its lowest definition is a soul? 
There can be but one answer. It is a self-active 
energy. What is meant by self-activity? The 
jDower of originating deeds and giving shape or 
form. Is there anything in plant life which proves 
the presence of such an energy? Yes, for it reacts 
against its environment. It is not constrained by 
external influence to build this or that body, but it 
uses material borrowed from its surroundings to 
create a body conforming to the model of its species. 
This model is the unconscious ideal which controls 
its recoil against environment. The plant is, there- 
fore, a creative energy building a body according 



THE SOUL OP THE FLOWER. 219 

to a plan, and with Mr. Ruskin we may confidently 
declare that " the power which catches out of chaos 
charcoal, water, lime, and whatnot, and fastens 
them down into a given form is properly called 
spirit or soul." * 

In the light of the doctrine of evolution we have 
learned to see that the plant is not only an archi- 
tectonic power, building a body according to an 
ideal, but that it actually modifies this ideal itself to 
suit changing conditions. Thus rushes, sedges, and 
grasses rank by descent as degraded lilies, the 
strawberry has developed from the little three- 
leaved white potentilla, and tracing the pedigrees 
of such widely different flowers as the daisy, the 
rose, and the buttercup, we find that they are the 
remote offspring of a common ancestor. In the 
succinct statement of Dr. Harris, the living being, 
plant, animal, or man, is a self-active energy, per- 
sisting under various environments, and manifest- 
ing his power by modifying his environment and 
liy modifying also his oivn organism,,-^ in order to 
accomplish his work better. Every new step he 
makes is transmitted to his progeny as so much 
inherited power. He builds himself in the process 

* The Queen of the Air, Eusldn, p. 73. f Italics mine. 

16 



220 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

of modifying liis environment and adapting it to 
liimself.* 

The theory of evolution points to the idea that 
functions precede and produce organs. We used 
to think that birds could fly because they were 
originally endowed with wings. We now begin to 
suspect they may have produced wings by efforts 
to fly. This revolutionary insight means the recog- 
nition of energy as the ground of being, and when 
really accepted it reveals the universe not as an 
assemblage of material bodies, but as a manifesta- 
tion of the activities of souls in all stages of de- 
velopment. 

And now I think we have arrived at a point of 
view from which the motto to Froebel's Flower 
Song will interpret itself. " Early give your child 
experience of the fact that in all living things there 
is revealed an essence (or spirit) which is struggling 
toward existence (or manifestation). Thus in each 
flower one distinctive type of life is expressed alike 
in form, color, and fragrance, because one energy 
brought into existence these several qualities." Dif- 
ferently stated, in the totality of its attributes the 
plant reveals its soul. This soul is the one thing 
* Hegel's Logic, p. 287. 



THE SOUL OF THE FLOWER. 221 

about the plant which is worth knowing. We learn 
to know it bj rightly reading its revelation just 
as rightly reading a man's life we grow to under- 
stand his character. Therefore, early help your 
child to seek the soul of the plant by studying 
its actions as registered in their outcome. And 
finally, since the flower is at once the highest ex- 
pression of vegetable self-activity, and the one 
which most sympathetically appeals to the young 
mind, let the search for plant souls begin by lov- 
ing flowers, proceed by nurturing them, and end 
by studying them. 

That men have instinctively recognized the 
blossom as the most perfect expression of the plant- 
soul is shown in the universal adoption of the 
flower as type of fulfilment. Man's highest deed is 
called the flower of his life, the great man is said 
to be the flower of his race, the great ages of his- 
tory are described as periods of national inflores- 
cence, and when Dante wishes to reveal the eternal, 
immortal, and invisible church as the consumma- 
tion toward which the universe moves, he paints 
that most wonderful of metamorphoses by which 
the ever-flowing stream of creation is transformed 
into the Great White Rose of Paradise. 



222 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

The revelation of tlie plant soul in its flower 
has been most beautifully interpreted by Mr. Rus- 
kin : " The spirit in the plant," he writes, " that is 
to say, its power of gathering dead matter out of 
the wreck round it, and shaping it into its own 
chosen shape, is, of course, strongest at the moment 
of its flowering, for it then not only gathers, but 
forms, with the greatest energy. 

" And where this life is in it at full power, its 
form becomes invested with aspects that are chiefly 
delightful to our own human passions — namely, 
first, with the loveliest outlines of shape; and, sec- 
ondly, with the most brilliant phases of the primary 
colors — blue, yellow, and red or white, the unison 
of all ; and, to make it all more strange, this time of 
peculiar and perfect glory is associated with rela- 
tions of the plants or blossoms to each other, corre- 
sjiondent to the joy of love in human creatures, 
and having the same object in the continuance of 
the race. Only, with respect to plants, as animals, 
we are wrong in speaking as if the object of this 
strong life were only the bequeathing of itself. 
The flower is the end or proper object of the seed, 
not the seed of the flower. The reason for seeds is 
that flowers may be, not the reason for flowers 



THE SOUL OF THE FLOWER. 223 

that seeds may be. The flower itself is the creature 
which the spirit makes; only, in connection with its 
perfectness is placed the giving birth to its suc- 
cessor." * 

If, therefore, during Harold's early childhood 
you will consciously restrict yourself to fostering 
his love for flowers, teaching him their common 
names, giving him the joy of seeking them in their 
native haunts, and the deeper joy of cultivating 
them in his own little garden, you will avoid many 
mistakes into which intelligent mothers and 
teachers are prone to fall. A few days ago a friend 
of mine called on an acquaintance of botanical 
proclivities. During her visit the latter received 
a basket of spring flowers, whereupon her three 
children fell at once to dissecting and describing 
them. Greatly impressed by what she had seen and 
heard, my friend procured similar flowers on her 
way home, and, feeling that she had criminally 
neglected the education of her own boy, began at 
once to remedy her sin by pulling them to pieces to 
show him their several parts. But the little fellow 
only buried his nose in the fragrant blossoms and 
stanchly declared that all he wanted to know was 
* The Queen of the Air, Ruskin. 



224 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

that the pretty flowers smelled sweet. I know a 
little girl who will never accept a gift of flowers 
because she fears being made to analyze them; and 
long experience in the kindergarten has convinced 
me of the great wrong done children by attempting 
to force upon them prematurely the habit of sci- 
entific observation. 

Some years ago a most interesting educational 
experiment was made by Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, 
with the avowed aim of forming in a child between 
the ages of four and seven, the " scientific cast of 
mind." In the course of the volume describing 
this experiment Dr. Jacobi takes issue with Miss 
Youmans on the question whether the child's study 
of plants should begin with the leaf or the flower. 
Miss Youmans had decided in favor of the leaf, on 
the ground that the simple should always precede 
the complex. But it is dangerous to make a single 
maxim bear the whole weight of a practical method, 
and Dr. Jacobi did a great service to primary edu- 
cation by pointing out that Miss Youmans had 
ignored the still more important maxim that intel- 
lectual education should begin with vivid sense im- 
pressions. The flower by its attractiveness appeals 
more strongly to the senses than the leaf, and hence 



THE SOUL OF THE FLOWER. 225 

is to be preferred for first study. Dr. Jacobi her- 
self was, however, betrayed into a psychologic error 
through the aim she set herself, as the following 
description, given by the child, of some growing 
beans will testify : " The episperm on the under 
surface is all black and has split, leaving a space the 
shape of an equilateral triangle with the apex point- 
ing to the convex edge of the cotyledons." The 
conscious observation and the mastery of technical 
terms displayed in this description imply a cultiva- 
tion of the understanding which should not be given 
during either the perceptive or imaginative epochs 
of intellectual development. 

By this time it is doubtless clear to you that 
Froebel always seeks the original point of contact 
between the mind of the child and the truth toward 
which his feeling and imagination is to be directed. 
You remember, too, that " the nursery was his uni- 
versity," and you will, therefore, not be surprised 
that in the Education of Man he thought it worth 
while to call attention to the way in which the sim- 
ple-hearted mother tries to make her baby dis- 
tinguish the difference between sweet-smelling 
and bad-smelling flowers : " How good the rose 
smells! Does baby want to smell too?" she ex- 



226 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

claims, making at the same time a little snuffing 
noise, or " How bad this smells," she says, turning 
with an expression of repugnance from the flower, 
which she puts out of the child's reach. This ma- 
ternal action gives the psychologic or subjective 
point of departure for the Flower Song, which, as 
you know, is called the Smell Song in the original 
Mother-Play. Its objective point of departure is 
suggested in the following passage, which is also 
from the Education of Man : " The distinct funda- 
mental law of vegetable life is that each successive 
stage of development is a higher growth of the pre- 
ceding one — e. g., the petals are transformed ordi- 
nary leaves, the stamens and pistils transformed 
petals. Each successive formation presents the 
essential nature of the plant in a more subtile garb, 
U7itil at last it seems clothed only in a delicate per- 
fume.^ You need only remind yourself that it is 
easier for little children to consciously discriminate 
the odors of flowers than their structure or color; 
that hence they love sweet smelling flowers more 
than any others; that the plants preferred by sav- 
ages and rustics are likewise those which appeal to 

* Italics mine. Education of Man, Hailmann's transla- 
lation, p. 194. 



THE SOUL OF THE FLOWER. 227 

the senses of .taste and smell, and that in old- 
fashioned gardens fragrant flowers preponderated 
over all others, to be sure that in this as in so many 
other cases Froebel has found the root experience 
from which interest in plant life may be developed. 
Whether he is right in the assertion that the spirit 
of the flower exhales in its perfume is another ques- 
tion. Yet if the essence of the plant is revealed in 
the totality of its qualities it must of necessity be 
suggested in each one of them, and that we in- 
stinctively seek it alike in color, form, and perfume 
is proved by our perplexity when one of these 
qualities seems to contradict the others. 

And so, sneers the scofi^er of the Mother-Play, 
we are to teach botany by letting babies smell 
plenty of flowers. It seems trivial to write these 
words, but their justification is the fact that con- 
sciously or unconsciously ignoring the difference 
between a terminus ah quo and a terminus ad quern, 
Froebel's critics are continually holding him up to 
ridicule and contempt. Froebel believes that no 
study should float in the air without cords binding 
it to the solid ground of personal experience. He 
is the evolutionist among educators. He will not 
try to plant a full grown oak of thought. He will 



228 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

not even plant a sapling. He insists upon tlie acorn, 
and even this shall onlj be planted in a mental soil 
which has been prepared for its reception by fer- 
tilizing experiences. Therefore, he wishes the baby 
to see and smell flowers, the young child to seek 
them in garden, field, and meadow, the boy and 
girl to cultivate them. 

That every child may remember an Eden, every 
home should have a garden. You have blessed all 
your children with this vision of Paradise, and 
flooded them with sensations sweet. The ardor of 
the rose, the purity of the lily, the joy of the bird, 
and the aspiration of all living growing things have 
passed into their souls. This wealth of early ex- 
perience will enrich their whole lives. Tor Harold 
I want you to do one thing more, and as he grows 
older help him to " mingle his mind with Nature " 
by making a garden of his own. Partnership with 
flowers will teach him to recognize and respect their 
differing individualities. Digging and planting, 
watering and pruning, protecting and cherishing, 
he will learn the high privilege of nurture. ISTeed I 
add that waiting and watching for the appearance 
of the plant whose seed he has himself hidden in 
the cround his soul will be stirred as it can be in 



THE SOUL OP THE FLOWER. 229 

no other way by premonitions of the perpetual 
miracle of life ? 

Second only to the privilege of nurture is the 
joy of seeking flowers in field and meadow, forest, 
and upland. Few things will bind so closely the 
cords of sympathy between you and Harold as go- 
ing out with him into the great garden of Nature 
and helping him to make acquaintance with the 
flowers in their native haunts. When he is older 
you must turn him over to Mother ISTature herself; 
give him the joy of rambling alone through her 
sweet solitudes, and learning at first hand her 
strange secrets. Let him know the happiness of 
finding year after year violets on the same moist 
bank, daisies in the same field, clumps of mandrakes 
under the same trees, and of feeling with a thrill of 
wonder the permanency of the so transient seeming 
flowers. "When he brings you the blossoms he has 
gathered, the wreath he has woven, understand that 
the love in his heart is seeking expression and be 
thankful. Be ready to name the flowers he finds, 
knowing that to name objects is really in a sense to 
discover them, and that when Harold has learned 
the common names of a few flowers he will be eager 
to search both for them and for others still un- 



230 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

named. " The first conscious thought about wild 
flowers," writes Richard Jeffries, " was to find out 
tlieir names — the first conscious pleasure — and then 
I began to see many that I had not previously 
noticed. Once you wish to identify them there is 
nothing that escapes notice, down to the little white 
chickweed of the path and the moss on the wall." 

So long as Harold is satisfied with seeking and 
naming flowers be satisfied yourself, knowing that 
" beauty is its own excuse for being," and that 
through flowers his love for the beautiful is being 
stirred into conscious life. "Watch, however, for the 
moment when he shall seek to reproduce the loveli- 
ness he has learned to feel ; make it your part to dis- 
cover through what material his spirit finds readiest 
utterance, and encourage him as the case may be to 
write flower poems, to draw and paint flowers, or to 
model them in clay. Remember the Egyptian 
lotus, the annunciation lily, the fleur-de-lys of 
chivalry, the general influence of flowers in poetry, 
sculpture, painting, and decorative design. Re- 
member, too, that the watchword of a true educa- 
tion is development through self-expression, and 
that the ideal which Goethe pictured in his Peda- 
gogic Province is clamoring in all prophetic souls 



THE SOUL OF THE FLOWER. 231 

for its practical realization in the scliool, the col- 
lege, and the university. 

If jou will patiently follow where your boy 
leads, and not interfere with his development by 
forcing him to follow you, in good time you will be 
beset with curious questions. Then will come your 
great opportunity for directing his attention to 
those typical characteristics in which the soul of 
the plant manifests its individuality. The defect 
of untrained observation — a defect clearly shown 
in our common names for flowers — is that it notes 
merely the characteristics which obtrude themselves 
upon sense. Thus the pink is named from its 
pinked or jagged edges, the geranium (crane's bill) 
from the long projecting beak of its seed capsule, 
the buttercup from its cup-shaped flowers and yel- 
low color, the dandelion (French dent-de-lion) in 
allusion to the shape of its leaves. The many books 
which have been written on the language of 
flowers show the gap between an instinctive feel- 
ing that each flower has its peculiar individuality, 
and the scientific knowledge which makes recogni- 
tion of individuality possible. Since fame, for ex- 
ample, blows a trumpet, the trumpet flower shall 
represent fame; since mortification flushes the 



232 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

cheek, tlie crimson peony shall mean shame; since 
adders, being serjDents, are presumably treacherous, 
the bell-shaped flower called adder's tongue, " from 
a lance-like spike on which its seeds are produced," 
becomes the floral expression for deceit. Even the 
poet is often content with finding in the " beautiful 
hieroglyphics of Nature " a meaning " suited to his 
mind," or, differently stated, poems are products of 
fancy which " forsaking the intent of Nature, 
adopts ends of its own," instead of products of 
imagination which " follows the lines of Nature," 
brings to light " what is hidden in Nature, and 
shows what she is striving to accomplish." When 
we learn to read Nature aright we cease to invent 
metaphors, and discover that every natural object 
is in itself metaphorical. A true symbol is the 
lower analogue of the reality to which it corre- 
sponds, the reality and the symbol being indeed 
the same divine thought expressed on the one hand 
in spiritual, on the other in material speech. Sci- 
ence, therefore, is pioneer of the poet that is to be, 
one who shall reveal the universe as a vast palimp- 
sest written over again and again with ever-clearer 
revelations of the spirit. 

By calling Harold's attention to a few striking 



THE SOUL OF THE FLOWER. 233 

illustrations of the characteristic facts about flowers 
you may easily develop his curiosity into intelligent 
research. Explain to him the importance of insect 
visitors, and then show him the relationship be- 
tween the shapes of such flowers as the carnation 
and the morning-glory, and the sucking mouths or 
probosces of butterflies and moths. Interest him 
in cymes, panicles, and corymbs by telling him that 
small flowers have learned to group themselves in 
these different masses in order to attract insect 
attention. Give him his first lesson in political 
economy by teaching him that sunflowers, dahlias, 
chrysanthemums, daisies, are not single flowers, 
but floral communities in which the altruistic ray 
florets live entirely for the benefit of the disk florets. 
Open his eyes to the meaning of different colors 
by showing him that they correspond to differ- 
ences of structure, and hence act as advertisements 
to bees and butterflies. Teach him to recognize the 
law of compensation in the fact that brilliant 
flowers are often scentless, while inconspicuous 
blossoms, like the mignonette, wage their modest 
struggle for existence by help of their fragrance. 
Point out to him that " the acrid leaves of the but- 
tercup, the stinging cells of the nettle, the prickles 



234 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

of the gooseberry, tlie tliorns of the rose, tlie poison 
of the wolfsbane," are weapons used by these 
plants to defend themselves from animal attack. 
Soak and open some typical seed and show him how 
the mother-flower has wrapped her baby in blankets 
and jDrovided it with food. Incite him to observe 
the various devices adopted to disseminate seed — 
the feathery tufts of the dandelion, the silky sails of 
the milkweed, the prickly heads of the burdock, 
the snapping capsules of the jewel-weed. Above 
all, make him realize that forms, colors, structures, 
perfumes, weapons, maternal devices, being all the 
results of different methods of fighting the battle 
of life, are the outward and visible signs of different 
individualities, and the world of flowers is, there- 
fore, a visible revelation of moral good and evil. 

" In our conviction," writes Victor Hugo, " if 
souls were visible we should distinctly see the 
strange fact that every individual of the human 
species corresponds to some one of the species of 
animal creation ; and we might easily recognize the 
truth which has as yet scarce occurred to the 
thinker, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the 
hog to the tiger, all animals are in man." In view 
of the revelations of botany may we not say that 



THE SOUL OF THE FLOWER. 235 

plants are likewise " the figures of onr virtues and 
our vices, the visible phantoms of our souls? " 
May we not even question whether it be not liter- 
ally true that in the vegetable and animal worlds 
we survey individuality in the process of formation, 
blind will shaping all possible types of character, 
and prejjaring all possible occasions for moral con- 
flict? 

My letter is drawing to its close. Its purpose 
will be fulfilled if it hel]3s you to realize the wide 
reach of Froebel's suggestion of the angel or fairy 
in the flower.* That many children believe in the 
flower fairy who is really their incarnation of 
the flower soul, we all know, but it would be most 
interesting to determine by sympathetic questions 
to large numbers of children how general this faith 
may be, and what differing forms it assumes. It is 
matter of familiar knowledge that primitive men 
expressed in kindred fashion their recognition of a 
spiritual principle of life in plants. Even to-day 
the Wallachian peasant believes that " every 
flower has a soul, and that the water lily, the pure 

* This sufj^gestion occurs in the Flower or Smell Song. 
That Froebel understood its implication he proves in the 
motto. 

17 



236 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

and scentless flower of the lake, shall stand at the 
gate of Paradise to judge the rest." * The faith 
that at death the souls of men enter into plants is 
common to many primitive peoples, and its vestiges 
may be traced both in mediaeval legend- and in 
popular superstition. Thus, in the story of Tris- 
tram and Isolde there springs from the grave of 
the former an eglantine which twines about the 
statue of his beloved, and in German folklore the 
soul " is supposed to take the form of a lily or a 
white rose, one of these flowers appearing on the 
chairs of those about to die." f In Scandinavian 
mythology all mankind are descended from the ash 
and the elm. Buddhist books prove that in the 
early days of this religion " it was matter of con- 
troversy whether trees had souls, and, therefore, 
whether they might lawfully be injured. Ortho- 
dox Buddhism decided against tree souls, but in- 
sisted that certain devas or tree spirits reside in 
the bodies of trees and speak from within them." 
'* Buddha himself was such a tree genius forty-three 

* The Folklore of Plants, T. F. Thistleton Dyer, p. 4. (The 
water lily of New England is very sweet scented (Nymphtea 
odorata), that of the Mississippi valley and that of England 
nearly scentless.) 

t The Folklore of Plants, p. 12. 

\ 



THE SOUL OP THE FLOWEK. 237 

times in the course of his various transmigra- 
tions." * In Greek mythology " the life of the 
hamadryad is bound to her tree ; she is hurt when it 
is wounded, she cries when the axe threatens, she 
dies with the fallen trunk." f Greece has also her 
transformation myths wherein human beings are 
changed to trees and flowers, but in this gifted 
people the conception of free individuality has be- 
come so strong that the metamorphosis of man into 
either plant 'or animal is considered a degradation. 
And as Greek imagination is the first to feel the 
transcendence of the human soul, so Greek philoso- 
phy is the first to discover and refute the presup- 
positions of metempsychosis. " According to Pytha- 
gorean myths," writes Aristotle, " any soul may 
inhabit any body. This conception is about as 
reasonable as would be that of architecture mak- 
ing tools of flutes. Each art must have its own 
tools. Each soul must have its own body." 
" Bodies," adds Hegel, commenting on this pas- 
sage, " are not arbitrarily and accidentally re- 
lated to souls, nor are souls arbitrarily and acci- 
dentally related to bodies. Metempsychosis im- 

* Primitive Culture, E. B. Tylor, vol. i, p. 476 ; vol. ii, p. 317. 
t Primitive Culture, E. B. Tylor, vol. ii, p. 219. 



238 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

plies arbitrary relationsliip. Aristotle's refutation 
is conclusive." * 

In an age which claims that even human psy- 
chology may be taught without a Psyche, it seems 
to me well that we should strengthen our sense of 
the reality of spiritual energy by recognizing its 
presence in forms of life inferior to our own. l^o 
less important is it, on the other hand, to dis- 
criminate between the nutritive, the sensitive, and 
the rational soul, or between spiritual activity 
as manifested respectively in plant, animal, and 
man. We have seen that (by the plastic energy of 
an indwelling ideal) the plant shapes material ap- 
propriated from its surroundings into a body con- 
forming to the model of its species. The animal 
soul does more than this, for it adds to the power 
of assimilation the activities of sensation and loco- 
motion. Through sensation it makes an ideal repro- 
duction of its surroundings; through locomotion it 
is able to change its environment and thus to mod- 
ify the influences against which it reacts. More- 
over, the animal begins to discern possibilities in 
the material of Kature, and hence to adapt it to 
new purposes. From the pollen of flowers the bee 
* Geschichte der Philosophic, vol. i, p. 373, 



THE SOUL OF THE FLOWER. 239 

makes wax and forms cells; from mud and leaves, 
from twigs and hairs, birds build their differing 
nests. Beavers construct lodges, dams, and canals. 
The elephant makes himself a fan by breaking off 
the branch of a tree and stripping it of all foliage 
excei)t a bunch of twigs and leaves at the top; 
monkeys use stones as hammers, levers, and pro- 
jectiles; and a cebus observed by Mr. Romanes 
actually discovered for himself the mechanical prin- 
ciple of the screw. The great defect of both plant 
and animal souls is that all their activity is incited 
by unconscious ideals, and hence that there is an 
unbridged and bridgeless chasm between the indi- 
Aadual and the species. Looking abroad upon the 
world of Nature as distinct from the world of man 
we behold the tragic spectacle of ideal energies for- 
ever seeking, yet forever debarred from finding 
their adequate embodiment. In man, however, 
the generic ideal becomes the conscious self of the 
individual. Recognizing in himself the presence 
of this generic energy, the human being is able to 
discover the generic selves of plants and animals; 
to understand that all natural objects and forces are 
mere points and arcs on great circles of possibility; 
to modify and adapt ]Srature to his own purposes; 



240 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

to enter by participation into the total acliievement 
of bis own race, and to apprebend and interpret 
the one great ideal under whose impulsion the 
whole universe wrestles and strives, works and wills. 

Science has reduced all the phenomena of Na- 
ture to a series of motions, explained these motions 
by a correlated system of forces, and assumed as the 
unity of this correlated system a persistent force 
which is " the energy of each particular force with- 
out its quality." * This insight means the recogni- 
tion of self-activity as the source and origin of all 
activity, and of all static phenomena. Upon the 
plane of life the one persistent force or creative 
energy dirempts itself into countless specific ener- 
gies which manifest self-activity in ascending de- 
grees. Upon the plane of human life it comes to 
self-knowledge in the consciousness of rational indi- 
viduals to whom it has communicated its fullness 
and who reflect its image. 

It was a deep saying of Froebel that " as the 
age of Jesus demanded faith, so the present age 
demands insight." The truth which to-day is 
flashing out into luminous consciousness is that the 
world-order is not material but spiritual, and that 
* Introduction to the Study of Philosophy, Dr. Harris, p. 86. 



THE SOUL OP THE FLOWER. 241 

its only realities are God and tlie souls upon wliom 
in proportion to their plasticity lie stamps his image, 
to whom in the measure of their capacity he reveals 
his thought and communicates his blessedness. 
From this insight stream the spiritual rays which, 
penetrating the opaque body of the cosmos, photo- 
'graph for us its invisible structure. 

" And what if all of animated Nature 
Be but organic harps divinely framed 
And trembling into thought, as o'er them sweeps 
Plastic and vast one universal breeze 
At once the soul of each and God of all." 




"^ 19 3u »mf en mit bem §anbd)cn f Icln ! Wfy yr K A C ''^C^ 

i^\ g(J lii fces ttben« lebcnb'gee (Sefiiljl, |f/airwfl^'">'p[^(i" » ' 

, _ _(, i^^ 9l'*t a""" VIA' J ' "" ' 




LETTER Yin. 

TKE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 

BECKONING THE CHICKENS. 

Because he lives himself, the child 

Oft thiuks that all things live, 
Aud pours his little heart upou 

That which no love can give. 

But when his life, outreaching, meets 

With answering life around. 
His wistful eyes are lit with joy 

That comrades he has found. 

Henrietta R. Eliot. 

BECKONING THE CHICKENS. 

Tiny fingers in a row. 

Beckon to the chickens — so. 

Downy little chickens dear, 

Fingers say, " Come here ! come here ! " 

Chick ! chick ! chick ! chick ! 
Fingers say, " Come here ! come here ! " 
Pretty chickens, soft and small, 
Do not fear — we love you all ! 

Emily Huntington Millee. 

Dear : In liis Descent of Man Mr. Dar- 
win relates a story which seems to indicate that 

germs of the animism characteristic both of chil- 

243 



244 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

dren and savages may exist even in animals, " My 
dog," be writes, " a full-grown and very sensible 
animal, was lying on tbe ground during a bot and 
still day, but at a little distance a sligbt breeze 
occasionally moved an open parasol wbicb would 
bave been wbolly disregarded by tbe dog bad any 
one stood near it. As it was, every time tbat tbe 
parasol sligbtly moved tbe dog growled fiercely 
and barked. He must, I tbink, bave reasoned to 
bimself in a rapid and unconscious manner tbat 
movement witbout any apparent cause indicated 
tbe presence of some strange living agent, and no 
stranger bad a rigbt to be on bis territory." * 

An even more remarkable example of canine in- 
telligence is given by Mr. Fiske in Mytlis and 
Mytli Makers. A skye terrier accustomed to obtain 
favors from bis master by sitting on bis bauncbes 
sat repeatedly before bis pet India-rubber ball 
placed on tbe cbimney-piece, evidently beseecbing 
it to jump down and play witli bim. Can we ex- 
plain bis action witbout assuming tbat be believed 
bis ball to be amenable to tbe same sort of appeal 
as bis master? 

I bave referred to tbese stories because in some 
* Cited in Myths and Myth Makers, p. 222. 



TliE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 245 

studies of childhood the habit of imputing life to 
inanimate objects is invested with a significance to 
which it has no valid claim. We are prone to 
credit animism with the conscious recognition of 
soul, but it is evident that the dogs in these stories 
neither imputed souls to the ball and umbrella nor 
suspected souls in themselves. They simply lacked 
ability to discriminate between living, self-moving 
objects and objects not alive. Animism is a realm 
of confusions, a morning twilight of intelligence 
in whose obscurity all objects lose clear outline. 
The soul in the animistic stage of development is 
not awake, but on the verge of awakening. It is 
a dreamer knowing not that it dreams; a somnam- 
bulist, living, moving, thinking, in its sleep. 

It is a momentous crisis when the soul makes 
the discovery of life, when emerging, as it were, 
from its trance, it recognizes a difference between 
moving and sentient creatures, and objects that are 
inert and devoid of feeling. Until we understand 
the marvel of this revelation we can never explain 
that most singular phenomenon of history — the 
worship of animals by nations in a relatively high 
state of culture. Of all peoples prior to the Greeks 
the Egyptians were the most advanced intellectually. 



246 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

yet, in contrast with tlie Persians, wlio worshiped 
light, their religion was zoolatrj. " To us," says 
Hegel, " zoolatry is repulsive. We may reconcile 
ourselves to the adoration of the material heaven, 
but the worship of brutes is alien to us. Yet it is 
certain that the nations who worshiped the sun and 
stars by no means occupy a higher grade than those 
who adored brutes. Quite the contrary is the truth, 
for in the brute world the Egyptians adored a hid- 
den and incomprehensible principle. We also, 
when we contemplate the life and actions of brutes, 
are astonished at their instinct, the adaptation of 
their movements to the objects intended, their rest- 
lessness, excitability, and liveliness, for they are 
exceedingly quick and discerning in pursuing the 
ends of their existence, while they are at the same 
time silent and shut up within themselves. We can 
not make out what possesses these creatures. A 
black cat, with its glowing eyes and its now gliding, 
now quick and darting movement, has been deemed 
the presence of a malignant being, a mysterious re- 
served specter; the dog, the canary bird, on the 
contrary, appear friendly and sympathizing. The 
lower animals are the truly incomprehensible." 
The worship of animals means that men have 



THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 247 

made the discovery of life, but not tlie discovery of 
spirit. They have felt how far sentient existence 
surpasses all inanimate being, and understood that 
the living worm is a higher creation than the life- 
less star. Realizing the mystery of sentient exist- 
ence, but not attaining to solution of the mystery in 
free spirit, they worship animals in whom the soul 
is still shut up and dulled by the physical organiza- 
tion. This obtuse life is the counterpart of their 
obtuse consciousness. 

Retracing the rise of thought from mere ani- 
mism to animal worship, we begin to appreciate that 
epoch-making transition in the child's life disclosed 
by his distinction of living objects from objects not 
alive, and his identification of the former as belong- 
ing to the same class with himself. His ball is mo- 
tionless save as he gives it movement. It is his own 
trot or gallop which transforms a mere stick into a 
horse. Even the doll's eyes open and shut only at 
his will. But the bird flies high in the air, the 
fish darts gayly through the water, the kitten laps 
her milk and purrs, the caged canary hops and 
sings, the dog runs and leaps, barks in his joy, 
growls when angry, whines when hurt. Here is 
movement, here is feeling, here is life answering to 



248 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

life, and with eyes from wlrich the scales have 
fallen the living child looks out upon all " singing, 
humming, whistling, buzzing, croaking, flying, 
creeping, crawling, climbing, burrowing, splashing, 
diving things," and knows that he has found com- 
rades. Is it strange that his countenance is lighted 
with joy? Is it wonderful that all the doings of 
these new-found comrades have for him an irresis- 
tible charm? 

"Watching a mother who was teaching her baby 
to beckon with tiny finger to some little chickens, 
Froebel recognized the expression of " life's living 
feeling that it is not alone in life," and under the 
inspiration of this experience wrote the first in 
order of time of the Mother-Play Songs. In the 
picture which accompanies it he seeks to open our 
ears, so that we too may hear the call of life to 
life. He shows us a baby who, loving himself to 
coo and chatter, listens with delight to the gob- 
bling turkey, the clucking hen, the peeping chick- 
ens. A little girl in whom stir incipient motherly 
impulses of watchfulness and care beckons the hen 
to come to her chickens. Her younger sister cares 
not for the mother-hen, but, crouched on the 
ground, watches intently the tiny chickens, to 



THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 249 

wliom she feels strangely akin. Each child sees in 
the " looking-glass of Nature " the energy that 
throbs in his own pulses. Life calls to life ; life looks 
at life; life recognizes life ; life exj^eriences the joy 
of life. Therefore, whatever the little ones feel in 
their own hearts they confidently seek in the actions 
of their newly discovered comrades, and the lesson 
of our play is simply to reveal to children their 
own mysterious life through its reflection in the 
sentient creatures who have not yet risen above life 
into consciousness. 

As Beckoning the Chickens sounds the call of 
life to life, so Beckoning the Pigeons repeats the 
answer of life to life. One reason wdiy the child 
loves animals is because they can respond to him. 
His dog knows his voice, his goat obeys bridle and 
whip, his kitten enjoys caresses, and pigeons and 
sparrows fly to get the food he scatters for them. 
His experience is like that of Donatello, who 
" spoke in a dialect broad as the sympathies of ITa- 
ture to the inarticulate brotherhood that prowl the 
woods or soar upon the wing"; or, if you prefer 
historic to imaginary examples, like the relation- 
ship of St. Francis to his brethren the birds, and 
like the experience of Thoreau, in whose hands fish 




250 



THE DISCOVERY OP LIFE. 251 

would lie quietly, as if knowing the toucli of a 
friend.* 

At an age when true companionsliip witli ma- 
ture human beings is impossible and the compan- 
ionship of child with child somewhat marred by 
mutual defect, the companionship of the child with 
the mute creatures to whom he already feels himself 
strangely superior, and therefore strangely bound, 
is of the utmost importance. It discloses ele- 
mentary traits and elementary relationships, and 
thus accelerates the progress of self -discovery; it 
reveals in naked hideousness propensities of anger, 
vanity, and greed, which in the human being early 
seek masks and disguises; and, most important of 
all, it calls forth the impulses of care and nurture. 

Since the activities of animals are preponder- 
antly reflex and instinctive they have a stability 
which is not to be looked for in the actions of hu- 
man beings. We can predict with tolerable cer- 
tainty what a dog will do under all circumstances, 
but we can utter no confident prophecy with regard 

* Miss Cody, of Toronto, tells me she knows a little boy 
whose companionship with birds is so sympathetic that many 
of them gather round him in response to a cooing sound which 
he makes. 

18 



252 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

to the actions of growing and unfolding men and 
women. The little child soon learns that his gen- 
erally patient nurse will sometimes be cross, his 
tender mother will sometimes be stern, his yielding 
playmates will sometimes become aggressive. His 
first experience of human nature, therefore, is that 
it is not to be relied upon. His perplexity is in- 
creased by the fact that persons sometimes say one 
thing w^hen they mean another, and the very exist- 
ence of ideal standards to which the most conscien- 
tious effort is not always able to square conduct in- 
troduces another element of uncertainty into his 
judgments. Recognizing our human instability, 
we appreciate the questions with which Froebel 
closes his commentary on Beckoning the Pigeons: 
'" Mother, did not your children respond more 
quickly to your words when they were too young 
to understand the meaning of words than they do 
now when this meaning is clear to them? Why is 
this? Must the animals teach us? In their lan- 
guage, word and fact, fact and word, word and 
deed, deed and word, are always one and the 
same! " 

Since Helen is interested in the child-study 
movement I suppose she has considered the sugges- 



THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 253 

tion that fables of animals should be told in the 
kindergarten, and I hope she feels as I do, that 
most fables are open to objection, because they 
deal with motives beyond the range of child- 
ish experience. Kousseau made an analysis of the 
fable of La Fontaine which relates how the fox by 
flattering the raven induced her to sing, and then 
ran away with the meat she dropped in opening her 
mouth. Do we wish to inoculate children with 
suspicion and distrust? The snake which the 
farmer warmed in his bosom only to be stung, the 
fox calling the grapes he could not reach sour, are 
other examples of meanings we would not willingly 
make accessible to childish imagination. A second 
objection to most fables is that their symbolism is 
artificial and the animals they portray are not true 
brutes but human beings in brute disguise. Dis- 
carding such artificial symbols, we discover the real 
life of animals to be symbolic because it presents 
analogies to human emotions, relationships, and ex- 
periences. Actual contact with animal life and 
actual care of animal pets are better for little chil- 
dren than stories about animals, although the latter 
are valuable as interpreters of experience. It seems 
to me the Animal Songs of the Mother-Play, with 



254 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

tlieir accompanying pictures, meet quite adequately 
the needs of children under six years of age. 

Having recognized his kinship with bird and 
beast, the child begins to imitate both. I need not 
exj)and this theme, for you have written me how 
Harold turns himself into every animal he sees, 
and how almost impossible it is to follow his rapidly 
shifting incarnations. One sentence in your letter 
suggests the reflection that this tendency to imitate 
animals should be carefully watched and guided. 
For if Harold can care so much to be a chicken that 
he actually climbs the perch to roost with his feath- 
ered friends, and if in his ambition to be a mother- 
hen he has crouched for an hour over an egg, he 
might be betrayed into repeating actions injurious 
to his moral development. Froebel has been sin- 
gularly wise in the animal activities he has selected 
for imitation. It is well to spring with the squirrel, 
gallop with the horse, fly with the bird, swim with 
the fish. It is well to win from the far-flying, home- 
coming pigeons the prescient joy of a broadening 
experience, and the prophecy of that luminous and 
illuminating love which sanctifies experience. It 
is well to learn from the Grass-Mowing Game how 
man has bent the brute to service, from the Knights 



THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 255 

the mastery of life by spirit, from the Barnyard 
the care and kindness we owe to the creatures upon 
whom we have set our yoke. The more we study 
these plays the greater will be our respect for the 
unerring judgment which enabled Froebel to omit 
nothing in animal life which could nourish ideal 
impulse and to avoid everything which might debase 
the human soul. 

The Fish in the Brook is an illustration of that 
higher symbolism which pierces to the soul of a 
natural object. The joyous motion of the fish in 
clear water, the ease with wliicli in its strong flight 
the bird cleaves the air, are true physical counter- 
parts of spiritual activity in a pure element, and 
therefore thrill the soul with their prophecy of 
freedom. " True hope," says Shakespeare, " is 
swift, and flies with swallow's wings." The poet 
in Timon of Athens declares that his poem shall 
" fly an eagle flight bold, and forth on, leav- 
ing no track behind," and Richard Lovelace 
exactly interprets the prophecy of Froebel's play 

when he writes : 

If I have freedom in my love. 

And in my soul am free, 
Angels alone that soar above 

Enjoy such liberty. 




256 



TflE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 257 

In proportion to liis recognition of that mys- 
tery of sentient existence which is the tie between 
him and his brethren of the forest and the field 
will be the child's desire to seek in animal relation- 
ships the counterpart of his own. Perhaps it would 
be more nearly true to say that in their relation- 
■ships he discovers his own. Some degree of separa- 
tion is presupposed in all recognition, and the 
child's life with his parents and in his home is so 
intimate that it forbids acquaintance. Hence, just 
as in the first three of his animal games, Froebel 
reveals life and free activity in the next two, the 
Bird's JSTest and the Pigeon House, he holds up a 
looking-glass wherein the young heart may discover 
its mother and its home. 

Is it necessary for me to say that while the Bird's 
Nest offers the most touching example of mother 
love and filial response, you should search through 
animal life for different versions of the one sweet 
story? Froebel gives you one typical play. You 
are to elicit its ideal and from this ideal create new 
plays and stories as life furnishes the occasion. 

The commentary to the Bird's ISTest rises from 
mother love to the motherly loA^e of God. A story 
related by Eckcrmann in his Conversations with 



258 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

Goethe lias so helped me to enter intimately into 
FroebeFs thought that I can not forbear copying 
it for you : 

" A nest of young hedge sparrows with one of 
the old birds which had been caught with birdlime 
had lately been brought me. I saw with admiration 
that the bird not only continued to feed its young 
in my chamber, but even when set free through the 
window returned to them again. Such parental 
love, sujjerior to danger and imprisonment, moved 
me deeply, and I expressed my surprise to Goethe. 

" ' Foolish man ! ' he replied, with a meaning 
smile; 'if you believed in God you would not 
wonder. Did not God inspire the bird with this 
all-powerful love for its young, and did not simi- 
lar impulses pervade all animate Nature, the world 
could not subsist. But thus is the divine energy 
everywhere diffused, and divine love everywhere 
active.' " 

" Goethe made a similar remark," adds his biog- 
rapher, " a short time ago, when a copy of My- 
ron's cow w^itli the suckling calf was sent him by 
a young sculptor. 

" ' Here,' said he, ' we have a subject of the 
highest sort — the nourishing principle which up- 



THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 259 

holds the world and pervades all ISTature is here 
brought before our ejes bj a beautiful symbol. 
This and similar images I call the true symbols of 
the omnipresence of God.' " 

The persistent attempt of I^ature to develop 
any ideal implies the realization of this ideal in the 
author of ISTature. Hence, from the tendency of 
E^ature to evolve life we infer life in her source; 
from her tendency to evolve consciousness we con- 
clude that a conscious personality incites her blind 
effort; from the favor she shows to animals, who 
through nurture of their young begin what Mr, 
Drummond has called " the struggle for the life of 
others," our faith leaps upward toward an altru- 
istic God and our hope bounds forward toward an 
altruistic humanity. 

The more truly we understand symbolism the 
more clearly do we comprehend that all things are 
symbolic. Moreover, there is an ascent of sym- 
bols. The care of the flower for its seed points 
upward to the care of the bird for its egg, care for 
the egg points to care for the young; the brute 
mother prophesies the human mother; the human 
mother predicts universal nurture of the weak by 
the strong; whether the strong be men or women; 




2G0 



THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 261 

universal nurture of weak liumanity by strong 
humanity points upward to God, whose whole life 
is a nurture of feeble souls into the strength and 
beauty of his divine image. Each lower stage of 
this cosmic process fulfills the next inferior and 
prophesies the next higher, so that the ascent of 
life is always from the symbol to a reality which 
becomes at once the prophecy of a higher revela- 
tion. 

As the Bird's l^est suggests ascending forms of 
nurturing love, so the Pigeon House interprets the 
ever-deepening meanings of home. The snail has 
his shell, the serpent his hole, the wild bird its 
nest, the domestic pigeon its house. From animal 
homes Froebel's picture rises to the home of man, 
and thence to the Church, the earthly home of the 
soul and of God. But no creature stays forever 
in its home, for that were to lose home. So our 
picture shows us pigeons flying from and to the 
pigeon house, a mother and children taking their 
walk abroad, two little girls returning from an 
outing and absorbed in what they are saying to 
each other about the afternoon's experiences, and a 
mother who seems to be teaching her child to repro- 
duce in play all this outgoing, incoming life. In 



262 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

the motto and commentary Froebel apprizes us that 
the mother should teach her child to weave into a 
whole the fragments of his experience, and thus, 
alternating the excursive with the collected state 
of the soul, live at home with himself. Finally, 
since the state of inner collectedness is the state of 
devotion, and all feeling of the wholeness of life 
rises into communion with the source of life, the 
soul at home in itself is at home with God. In 
such wise do our song, picture and commentary re- 
peat the prophecy of ISTature, " The foxes have 
holes and the birds of the air have nests," and dis- 
close to us its fulfillment in the promise of a final 
home for the soul, " In my Father's house are 
many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you." 
Were I writing to any one but you I should 
expect an answering letter which would remind 
me that thoughts such as these are for grown peo- 
ple and not for little children. To such a letter I 
should in turn reply that the Mother-Play is a 
mother's, or, better still, a parent's book. That it 
is also a child's book, and the sweetest of all books 
for children, I devoutly believe, and, as I have said 
again and again, its chief merit is that it finds in 
typical concrete experiences points of contact for 



THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 263 

the evolution of ideals in the young child, in his 
older brothers and sisters, in his father and mother. 
May not Harold see himself in the forth-flying, 
home-coming pigeons, and as he listens to their 
cooing may not the suggestion that they are telling 
each other where they have been stir in his little 
heart the desire to tell you what he has seen and 
done while absent from you ? May not Robert and 
James, Edith and Mary, watching you win Harold 
to confidence by the example of the pigeons, feel in 
themselves a stronger impulse to open to you their 
hearts and minds? Would not yovir eldest born 
write you with greater frankness of his college life 
and his vacation journeys had he at Harold's age 
formed that habit of tender intimacy which through 
Froebel you are learning to create in your baby? 
Is not your own study of the Pigeon House helping 
you to be at once more courageous and more sym- 
pathetic ; teaching you that " to make room for 
wandering is it that the world was made so wide " ; 
convincing you that you must restrict your chil- 
dren to no temporal or provincial life, and yet that 
while educating them for the citizenship of the 
world and the inheritance of the ages, you must 
keep them true to the " kindred points of heaven and 



264 LETTERS TO A MOTHEE. 

home "? Are 3^011 not growing to understand that 
the human soul can dwell permanently in no spiritual 
home save one of its own building? Are you not 
making it your conscious aim to so illuminate the 
minds of your sons and daughters with the eternal 
principles of spiritual architecture that you may 
securely hope they will hereafter fit the separate 
stones of experience they quarry from life into 
noble temples of the soul? And — one question 
more — are you not realizing with an ever-increas- 
ing clearness that just because of that eternal pro- 
cession of the divine thought we call the universe 
God himself dwells in an eternal home? Answer- 
ing these questions to your own heart you will com- 
prehend how a really typical fact appeals to minds 
in all stages of development and will recognize with 
fresh amazement Froebel's daringly original con- 
ception of ministering to what is deepest in the 
mature soul through that which appeals most 
sympathetically to the childish heart and imagina- 
tion. 

If you carry out the plan mentioned in your 
last letter, and really organize a mother's club for 
the study of Froebel's mottoes, songs, and commen- 
taries, I hope that your very first meeting may be 



THE DISCOVERY OP LIFE. 265 

devoted to the Pigeon House, and tliat you will 
strive to stir in the mind of every mother present 
the conscious ideal of seeking heart intimacy with 
her children. Your letters show that you mourn 
the lack of that unabashed and yearning confidence 
which is the j)ledge of filial dependence. Your ex- 
perience is, unfortunately, not an exceptional one. 
The ordinary American family is not a family in 
any true sense of the word, but a mere assem- 
blage of isolated and independent units under the 
shelter of a single roof. Parents do not know their 
children, children do not know their parents, and 
brothers and sisters are strangers to each other's 
tastes, pleasures, hopes, and disappointments. This 
crying defect in our domestic life can be overcome 
only by a clearer conception of the affections, sym- 
pathies, and duties arising out of parental, filial, 
and fraternal relationships. Surely the solitary are 
not set in families in order that they may remain in 
solitude ! 

Prom the animal as revealer of life and its rela- 
tionships Froebel passes first to the mastery of the 
animal by force, and second to its mastery through 
domestication. Whatever we may think of the 
Shadow Songs, we must recognize that they deal 




266 



THE DISCOVERY OP LIFE. 267 

with a jDliase of man's relationsliip to tlie brute crea- 
tion which historically has been a most important 
one, and which is destined to continue until all ani- 
mals are extirpated except those which can be do- 
mesticated or which in their natural state do not 
hinder the extension of civilization. The Egyp- 
tians would allow human beings to perish by famine 
rather than kill one of their sacred animals, and 
once, when a Roman in Alexandria killed a cat, 
an insurrection ensued in which the infuriated 
populace murdered the aggressor.* Buddhism to- 
day declares it a sin to take animal life, so no 
Buddhist could consistently celebrate a hunter or 
show children Froebel's shadow pictures. But we 
eat food and wear furs which the hunter provides, 
and each one of us wages unrelenting war against 
mice, spiders, flies, and mosquitoes. Either we are 
wrong in hunting and trapping these living crea- 
tures, in eating animal food, and wearing animal 
raiment, or we can not sit in judgment on the 
hunter. Moreover, unless wild beasts are exter- 
minated civilization can not extend, and if we 
honor St. Patrick for purging Ireland of serpents, 
how may we refuse honor to the huntsman who in 
* Hegel's Philosophy of History. 




268 



THE DISCOVERY OP LIFE. 209 

liis attack upon tigers, panthers, and boars is really 
the j)ioneer of progress. 

Whether young children may be shown pictures 
of a hunter or told stories celebrating his deeds is 
another question. In my judgment it is one of 
many whose general purport is how far the shadow 
side of life should be presented to immature minds, 
and all of which must be met as their occasion 
arises* 

It must be conceded that Froebel has presented 
this delicate subject in its least objectionable light. 
The story implied in the picture of the hare is iden- 
tical with our traditional nursery rhyme Bye-baby 
Bunting. The hunter is a father who through the 
chase provides for the needs of his children, and 
who with thoughtful affection brings home a living 
pet for his little daughter. Two other Shadow 
Songs relate to the destruction of the wolf and 
wild boar, both of which are fierce and dangerous 
animals. Finally, in a suggestive picture Froebel 
shows us that the wolves have been busy in the 
sheepfold, and liave carried off and devoured a 
lamb. 

Every natural fact, says Emerson, has a higher 
value as a symbol. Froebel's commentaries on the 



270 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

Shadow Songs indicate that he was thinking of the 
beast in man as well as the beast in the world. The 
wolf and boar must become extinct in man, and 
each human being must be a hunter who in the 
tangled forest of the soul meets and slays the beasts 
that skulk there. Failing in his duty as spiritual 
huntsman, he becomes a demon. This unconquered 
bestiality which sinks reasonable man lower than 
the irrational brute is strikingly imaged by Dante 
in the man-wolf, the man-bull, and the man-serpent 
of his Inferno, and by Goethe in his evolution of 
Mephistopheles from the dog. 

It was doubtless with intention that Froebel 
illustrated the outer and inner mastery of the brute 
by shadow pictures. For as shadows are produced 
by intercepting light, so the dense body of our ig- 
norance, barring the passage of that universal rea- 
son which is the light of spirit, gives rise to all 
the problems which torment our minds. Among 
these problems few are more serious than those con- 
nected with the brute creation. ISTo less to us than 
to the ancients is animal life one of the chief of 
mysteries, but the mystery has changed its form. 
To the Egyptian, as we have seen, the animal soul, 
shut up within its physical organization and dulled 



THE "DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 271 

thereby, seemed divine. " Sj^irit had," says Hegel, 
" a band around its forehead." Itself imprisoned, 
it worshiped the imprisoned spirit of animals. To 
the modern world, which has torn the band from its 
forehead, the problem changes its nature. Our- 
selves conscious and conscious of consciousness, we 
look with dismay upon creatures who, lacking rea- 
son, share with us the mystery of sentient existence. 
In a sermon entitled Mysteries of l^ature and of 
Grace, Cardinal I^ewman has put this problem be- 
fore us in all its force. " We behold," he writes, 
" the spectacle of brute nature, of impulses, feel- 
ings, propensities, passions, which in us are ruled 
or repressed by a superintending reason, but from 
which when ungovernable we shrink as fearful 
and hateful because in us they would be sin. Mil- 
lions of irrational creatures surround us, and it 
would seem as though the Creator had left part of 
his work in its original chaos, so monstrous are these 
beings which move and feel and act without reflec- 
tion and without principle. To matter he has given 
laws. He has divided the moist and the dry, the 
heavy and the rare, the light and the dark. He has 
placed the land as a boundary for the sea, a per- 
petual precept which it shall not pass. He has 



272 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

tamed the elements and made them servants of the 
universal good, but the brute beasts pass to and fro 
in their wildness and their isolation, no yoke on 
their neck or bit in their lips, the enemies of all 
they meet, yet without the capacity of self-love. 
They live on each other's flesh; their eyes, their 
teeth, their claws, their muscles, their voices, their 
walk, their structure within, all speak of violence 
and blood. They seem made to inflict pain; they 
rush on their prey with fierceness and devour it 
with greediness. There is scarce a passion or a feel- 
ing which is sin in man but is found brute and 
irresponsible in them. Rage, Avanton cruelty, 
hat-red, sullenness, jealousy, revenge, cunning, 
malice, lust, envy, vainglory, gluttony — each has 
its representative. Is it not marvelous that the 
All-Wise and All-Good should have poured over 
the face of his fair creation these rude existences, 
that tliey should divide the earth with man, and 
should be actual lords of a great portion of its 
surface? " * 

It is a half-hearted faith which blinks at prob- 
lems. To really trust God is to dare to look every 
mystery straight in the face, and when we so dare 
* Sermons to Mixed Congregations. 



THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 273 

and so look we begin to find our answer. To tlie 
mystery of animal life the answer seems to me clear 
and decisive. We are told that in our whole vast 
universe a single atom of matter is never destroyed. 
That which has once had being never ceases to be. 
But life is more than mere being: it is a luminous 
spark which may flame into spirit. Can God suffer 
this luminous spark to go out in utter darkness, or 
must the divine breath blow it into flame? 

The cumulative evidence of all facts known to 
us points to idealism for their adequate interpreta- 
tion, and as I suggested to you in my last letter, 
idealism means that the only realities in the 
world are God and the souls in whom he progres- 
sively creates his image. Evolution is not material, 
but spiritual, and the series and procession of vege- 
table and animal forms is only the semblance of a 
series and procession of souls. 'No soul perishes; 
all ascend through " the spires of form " to human- 
ity. I The human form is final and permanent be- 
cause it is the form of consciousness which is all- 
inclusive. Below man individuality is in process of 
making. But you will be you and I shall be I 
forever, because we can include all wisdom, all 
goodness, and all love in our individual conscious- 



274 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

ness. Accepting this triitli, we can survey with 
untroubled minds that world display of mutual 
carnage which is the method of developing energy, 
courage, and all the traits which, when redeemed 
from selfishness, become the mainstays of selfhood.* 
Am I allowing myself to be betrayed into writ- 
ing you of questions which, while they may have 
a speculative interest for you and me, are without 

* In his Psychologic Foundations of Education, p. 233, Dr. 
HaiTis confesses his faith that " permanent individuality may 
exist as low as the animals — indeed, it is probable that it does 
so exist, for the world seems to be a sort of cradle for the nur- 
ture of independent individuality." 

Referring to animals, one of the authors of Lux Mundi 
(p. 91) writes as follows : 

" What are they ? Had they a past ? May they not have 
a future ? What is the relation of their consciousness to the 
mighty life which pulses within the universe ? May not East- 
ern speculation about these things be nearer the truth than 
Western science ? " Evidently the writer of these questions 
was inwardly convinced of their answer. 

In the Christ of To-Day Dr. Gordon thus boldly avows his 
conviction : 

" The ultimate center of all the force that shapes from 
within and all the energy that stimulates from without is 
the personal being of God. This is the eternal reality of the 
universe. What we call things are but the various and tran- 
sient processions of the infinite personal soul ; what we call 
animal life is but the divine differentiated into temporary, 
semi-independent existence; what we call man is but the 
primal personality uttered in terms of its own highest being, 
the finite lifted into the image of the Infinite and ordained to 
perpetual fellowship with him." 



THE. DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 275 

practical bearing on tlie subject of nursery educa- 
tion? If this doubt has flitted through your mind, 
remember that your very last letter contained a 
pitiful account of your vain effort to console little 
Edith when her pet canary was killed by her kitten. 
She understood that she must forgive her kitten 
because " it knew no better," but she wanted to 
know what had become of her bird, and you could 
not tell her. Had you really believed that no life 
perishes and no attained degree of individuality is 
ever lost, might you not have found true and simple 
words with which to soothe the real anguish of her 
loving heart? 

Many minor questions are suggested in Froe- 
bel's Shadow Songs, but as both your patience and 
my time have limits I forbear to touch them, and 
hasten to indicate as briefly as possible the lesson of 
the Barnyard. Mastery by force is only the sem- 
blance of mastery. All true mastery is mastery of 
love. The triumphant march of the Mother-Play 
is from the child as a mere object of nurture to the 
child with nascent consciousness of becoming him- 
self a nurturer. " Answer me," says Froebel, 
" but one question. What is the supreme gift 
you would bestow on the children who are the life 



276 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

of your life, the soul of your soul? Would you 
not above all other things render them capable of 
giving nurture? Would you not endow them with 
the courage and constancy which the ability to give 
nurture implies? Mother, father, has not our com- 
mon effort been directed toward just this end? . . . 
Has not our inmost longing been to capacitate our 
children for this inexpressible privilege? " 

Our educational practice is halting and vacillat- 
ing because we look toward no sure goal of our 
endeavor. Froebel is steadfast and consistent be- 
cause he knows exactly what he wishes to do. De- 
fining education as the nurture of nurturers, he 
treads with unhesitating feet the path which climbs 
toward his accepted goal. His educational aim is 
determined by his world view. Accepting with re- 
generate intellect that doctrine of incarnation which 
is the kernel of Christianity, he recognizes that it 
lies in the nature of God to communicate his own 
perfection to his creatures. Such a God is a God 
of self-imparting love, who can never be satisfied 
with giving until he has given all he has and all 
he is. Hence he is the supreme nurturer, and the 
goal of creation is a community of souls in whom he 
has perfected his own image. Conversely, if God 



THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 277 

can incarnate himself, then humanity can be the 
receptacle of the divine. Finally, as each man 
ascends into the divine image he becomes a sharer 
in divine activity, and from an object of nurture is 
transformed into a nurturer. 

Least things are explained by greatest, and only 
as you sympathize with Froebel's final aim can you 
realize the importance of actual care for plants and 
animals and understand the significance of the 
Barnyard Play as a means of quickening the sense 
of responsibility and granting to childhood some 
prescience of the joy which springs from the exer- 
cise of nurturing love. 

When we study the past history of our earth we 
become aw^are that Xature has been undergoing a 
gradual pacification. Cyclones, earthquakes, vol- 
canic eruptions, the wild fury of the sea, are but 
faint echoes of the convulsions of long-vanished 
days. There was an age when vegetable life ran 
riot and no animal could cope with its resistless 
strength. There was a time when great mastodons 
and ichthyosauri were masters of the earth. There 
will come a time when man shall be not only theo- 
retically but practically lord of creation, when he 
shall have drained the swamp, fertilized the desert, 




278 



THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE. 279 

subdued tlie riotous vegetable life of Soutli Amer- 
ica, extirpated tlie irredeemable brute, domesti- 
cated all animals capable of moral and mental im- 
provement, and wlien, himself regenerate, be stall 
rule a regenerate earth* Symbol and prophecy of 
that happy time is the little child in the Barnyard, 
a new Adam in a new paradise, to whom God 
giveth the beasts of the field for a heritage and the 
fowls of the air for a possession. 

The discovery of life, the response of life to life, 
the prophecy of freedom, the disclosure of human 
and divine love, the revelation of human and di- 
vine homes, the extinction of the savage beast in 
the world and in the soul, the vision of nurtured 
and nurturing life — such are the truths Froebel 
holds up to the imagination of the child and the 
thought of the mother in his Animal Songs* Wliat 
aspect of animal life has he ignored? To what 
worthy analogy has he been blind? 



LETTEK IX. 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 

THE FISH IN THE BEOOK. 

A child regards with new delight 
Each living thing that meets his sight ; 
But when within the limpid stream 
He sees the fishes dart and gleam, 
Or when, through pure transparent space 
The bird's swift flight he tries to trace, 
Their freer motion fills his heart 
With joy that seems of it a part — 
A joy that speaks diviner birth, 
While yet he treads the ways of earth. 

Heneietta R. Eliot. 

THE FISH IN THE BROOK. 

Merry little fishes, 

In the brook at play. 
Floating in the shallows. 
Darting swift away. 
' Happy little fishes, come and play with me ! " 
■ No, O no ! " the fishes say, "that can never be ! " 

Pretty bodies curving, 
Bending like a bow, 
Through the clear, bright water, 
See them swiftly go. 
' Happy little fishes, may we play with you ? " 
' No, O no ! " the fishes say, "that would never do ! " 

Emily Huntington Miller. 
281 



282 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

Deak : In that great city of Weissniclitwo, 

wliicli Carlyle lias made so famous and which, as all 
students of spiritual geography know, is situated 
just within the borders of modern Utopia, there 
lives and works a kindergarten trainer who has suc- 
ceeded in approximately realizing the ideals toward 
which all training schools are striving. Just as I 
was beginning to collect my thoughts on the Fish 
in the Brook I received from her a letter which 
said all I wanted to say, and which I have there- 
fore decided to copy and send to you instead of 
writing you myself. 

How I wish, dear friend [so begins her letter], 
that you could have attended our conference yester- 
day. I came home from the meeting the happiest 
of women. The reason of my happiness? That is 
what I am going to tell you just as fast as I can. 

It was a stormy afternoon, and I knew in ad- 
vance that we should have an inspiring meeting, 
because only those who were most earnest would 
brave the tempest. Those who came to object and 
criticise; those who came because it might help 
their chances of promotion ; those who came because 
others came; those who came from mechanical 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 283 

habit, carried to the place of meeting, as it were, by 
a series of automatic leg reflexes, would all be ab- 
sent, and we should not feel the weight of their 
leaden atmosphere. As I entered the room I looked 
around, and my spiritual temperature began to rise. 
For there they were, all my bravest, dearest, best, 
and their kindling eyes told me they felt as I felt. 
Were we very wicked to be so glad we were alone? 
As you know, the meetings are informal, and 
each one speaks as the spirit moves her. The sub- 
ject is chosen in advance, and printed slips are given 
the students suggesting the questions to be dis- 
cussed. The subject for this afternoon was the play 
of the Fish in the Brook, and the questions given 
the preceding week were as follows: 

1. Why does Froebel call this jilay The Fish in 
the Brook? 

2. Why does the child try to seize the fish? 

3. What experience comes to him through 
catching the fish? 

4. What general truths are illustrated in his 
desire for the fish, his seizure, and its results? 

5. Can self-activity be perfect so long as it is in 
any degree dependent upon an external environ- 
ment? 



2S4 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

G. In the liiglier forms of self-activity is tlie 
mind more and more self -environing? 

7. Is it equally true to say tliat it is only by 
ascent into the divine life that man realizes his free- 
dom ? 

8. Can you harmonize these two statements? 
You do not need to be told that the questions 

are only intended to incite thought, nor yet that, 
far from insisting upon following their order, I 
myself always try to follow the order in which the 
class develops the idea of the play. Even if you 
were not already familiar with our kindergarten 
method it would, I think, reveal itself in the course 
of this letter. 

The discussion this afternoon was opened by 

Miss . You remember her, do you not, the 

dear little kindergartner with the 'New England 
conscience, whom we used to call our categorical 
imperative? She had been reading Professor 
James's Psychology, and was very unhappy over 
the following statements : 

" If evolution and the survival of the fittest be 
true at all, the destruction of prey and of human 
rivals must have been among the most important of 
man's primitive functions; the fighting and the 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 285 

cliasing Instincts must have become ingrained. 
Certain perceptions must immediately, and with- 
out the intervention of inferences and ideas, have 
prompted emotions and motor discharges; and both 
the latter must, from the nature of the case, have 
been very violent, and therefore, when unchecked, 
of an intensely pleasurable kind. It is just be- 
cause human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive 
part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially 
where a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the 
fun." * 

" In illustration of this thesis," said Miss , 

*•' Mr. James quotes from Fowler the statement that 
' every one knows what pleasure a boy takes in 
the sight of a butterfly, fish, crab, or other animal, 
or of a bird's nest ; . . . how he delights in pulling 
out the wings and legs of flies, and tormenting one 
animal or another; . . . with what irresistible 
strength the plundering of birds' nests attracts him 
without his having the least intention of eating the 
eggs or the young birds, f . . . Our ferocity,' con- 
cludes Mr. James, ' is blind, and can only be ex- 
plained from heloiv. Could we trace it back 

* Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, p, 413. 
f Ibid., p. 411. 



2S6 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

tlirougli our line of descent we sliould see it taking 
more and more the form of a fatal reflex response, 
and at the same time becoming more and more the 
pure and direct emotion that it is.' " * 

Having read these extracts, Miss confessed 

that thej had greatly troubled her. She had seen 
her little nephew when only a year old stamp on 
the ants which were running along the stone walk, 
and a few months later amuse himself for more 
than an hour by striking at the lake flies which 
thickened the air. Could it be, as Mr. James sug- 
gested, that " all living creatures tempt children's 
hands to a fascinating occupation to which they 
have to yield ? " and " that it is with them as with 
the boy fiend Jesse Pomeroy, who cut a little 
girl's throat ' just to see how she would act ' ? " 
Must we admit that this was why the child tried to 
catch the fish, and was it possible that the sight of 
a bird's nest only incited him to plunder it? If so, 
what became of Froebel's suggestion that the 
source of the child's delight in the fish was its free 
movement in a pure element, and that what his 
heart sought in the bird's nest was a revelation of 
mother love? 

* PrJQciples of Psychology, vol. ii, p. 414. 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 287 
There was a thouglitful pause as Miss 



took her seat, but I was glad to see that while some 
of the class looked startled no one seemed dis- 
mayed. The witness of the spirit within them was 
evidently strong. I remained quiet, knowing that 
before long this spirit would find utterance, and I 
was delighted that the first person who rose should 
be our best practical kindergartner and dearest 
lover of little children. She began by saying that 
while Mr. James's explanation of the impulse to 
seize and catch was quite new to her, she had been 
contrasting other explanations of the physiological 
psychologists and child students with those of Froe- 
bel, and it had occurred to her that while the latter 
sought the rudimentary forms of all higher human 
activities the former were interested in the vestiges 
of our savage and brute inheritance. " Such a dif- 
ference of interest must result both in concentrating 
attention upon different manifestations of child- 
hood and in different explanations of the same 
manifestations. Froebel had studied the favorite 
occupations and amusements of little children be- 
cause he discovered in them parallels to each of the 
typical forms of adult activity. In the love of pet 
animals and the desire to plant gardens he recog- 



288 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

nized the impulses of the herdsman and the agricul- 
turist. He found sewing, weaving, building, 
molding, drawing, painting, dancing, singing, all 
practiced by little children and encouraged by wise 
parents. He observed that in their spontaneous 
games children imitated family and social life, 
founded states, and reproduced in their own way 
the ideals of religion. In a word, he discovered in 
the spontaneous self-revelations of childhood the 
embryonic forms of all truly human activities, and 
by simply exj^laining what children were trying to 
do and creating instrumentalities through which 
their efforts might be wisely abetted he trans- 
formed play into education. 

" The physiological child students set them- 
selves a different problem. Their interest was in 
survivals. The distention of the nostrils in anger, 
for example, had challenged the attention of Mr. 
Spencer, and was interpreted by him as ' an echo 
of the wa}^ in which our ancestors had to breathe 
when during combat their mouth was filled up by 
a part of an antagonist's body which had been seized.' 
In similar vein Dr. Hall had interpreted both the 
charm and fear of water as a soul vestige of the 
' volume of life that had been lived aquatically/ 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 289 

' the fear of big eyes and teetli as ancestral rever- 
berations from the long ages of struggle with savage 
beasts and savage men, and fears of wind and thun- 
der to telluric and cosmic conditions now modified 
or extinct.' Dr. Hall had, moreover, emphatically 
claimed, as the chief value of the movement with 
which he was identified, that it ' introduced evolu- 
tion into the study of the soul, and had thus begun 
a movement bigger than Darwinism, and destined 
to shelve our cross-section adult psychology beside 
the old biological literature on fixed species.' " 

In illustration of different possible explanations 

of the same activity Miss suggested that boys 

liked to climb trees, and one might accentuate in 
interpretation of this propensity either that the 
love of climbing was an inheritance from a monkey 
ancestry, that it was an expression of the desire to 
exert force and conquer difficulties, or, finally, that 
an ideal motive was stirred by the vision of the 
whole landscape as seen from the top of the tree. 

" Doubtless," added the speaker, " there is an 
element of truth in each of these explanations, but 
the point to be observed is that as the hereditary 
impulses wane the ideal impulse waxes. The lat- 
ter is therefore the one with which education is 



290 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

chiefly concerned, and is that which is emphasized 
hj FroebeL" She then read the following extract 
from The Education of Man: 

" It is not alone the desire to use his power that 
prompts the boj to seek adventure high and low, 
far and wide ; it is the desire to control the diversity 
of things; W see individual things in their connec- 
tion with a whole, especially to bring near that 
which is remote; to comprehend the outer world 
in its extent, its diversity, its integrity; it is the de- 
desire to extend his scope step by step. 

" To climb a new tree means to the boy the dis- 
covery of a new world. The outlook from above 
shows everything so different from the ordinary 
cramped and distorted side view. How clear and 
distinct everything lies beneath him! Could we 
but recall the feelings that filled our hearts and 
souls in boyhood, when the narrow limits of our 
surroundings sank before our extended view we 
should not cry out to the boy : ' Come down ! you 
mightfall!'"* 

Miss then rc^Jeated with great simplicity 

Stevenson's poem Foreign Lands. " Stevenson and 

Froebel," she said in conclusion, " have truly de- 

* Education of Man. Hailmann's Translation, pp. 102-103. 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 291 

cipliered the liieroglypliic of cliildisli feeling. 
Their explanation is poetic and educational. The 
explanation by simian descent is of value chiefly to 
the scientist. Is not the truth, as Emerson tells us, 
that we stand on a stairway with steps below and 
steps above us? We have come from below, we are 
mounting toward the height, and the step on which 
we stand is related both to those below and those 
above us. But it is more important to know 
whither we are going than whence we have come, 
and just because Froebel sought for prophecies 
rather than vestiges he is thus far the greatest of 
child students." 

Iso pause followed the conclusion of Miss 's 

remarks. She had touched the chords to which 
all Froebelian sympathies respond, and her last 
words had scarcely died upon the air when one 
whom our students call the elect thinker was open- 
ing to us new vistas of truth. " Miss ," she 

began, " has shown us very clearly that the genesis 
of an activity is not a revelation of its nature, and 
that metamorphosis is implied in all spiritual as well 
as in all physical evolution. It remains for us to 
seek the tie which binds together the separate 
stages of our evolutionary process, or, in other 



292 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

words, to discover tlie inner impulsion which unifies 
all the metamorphoses of life and thought. Grant- 
ing, therefore, that the child's seizure of the fish is 
originally an automatic response to external chal- 
lenge ; admitting that his pugnacious instinct is the 
survival of an ancestral series of violent and hence 
pleasurable emotions; and agreeing with Mr. James 
that the point of departure for the whole series was 
the destruction of prey and of human rivals, let us 
ask ourselves the simple question, Why does the 
savage pursue prey and attack competitors? Is not 
the answer self-evident? He pursues prey in order 
to satisfy his hunger, and he attacks human rivals 
because they diminish his chances of obtaining this 
satisfaction. In hunger, therefore, we discover his 
aboriginal motive of action, and an analysis of the 
feeling of hunger shows that in common with other 
primitive appetites and desires it implies the dis- 
crimination of a possible as opposed to an existing 
state of the self. Strike a stone and it remains mo- 
tionless. Strike a worm and the shrinkage of its or- 
ganism and its hurried retreat declare both its living 
unity and its sense of a pain for which it seeks re- 
lief. Elongating itself in the sunshine, the pro- 
tozoon afiirms its discrimination between a state of 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 293 

greater and one of less warmth and its decided 
preference for the former. In like manner, 
through the struggle for food animals and primi- 
tive men assert their consciousness of a possible 
state of satisfaction as contrasted with a state of dis- 
comfort. 

" Recognizing that coiled up in feeling is dis- 
crimination between actual and possible states of 
the self, we celebrate with joy the birth of the ideal 
in the soul. Twin born with the ideal is purpose 
or design. Through a progressive ascent of ideals 
are produced all the metamorphoses of spiritual 
evolution. Finally, the ascent of ideals takes place 
both in feeling and in thought, and children may 
become unselfish in their emotions long before they 
comprehend altruistic imperatives. It is in this way 
that an ideal born of sympathy with free activity 
supersedes the pugnacious instinct which rises to 
meet the challenge of living creatures, and it is pre- 
cisely the object of Froebel's Fish in the Brook so to 
strengthen the spiritual tie as finally to overcome 
the predatory reaction." 

There was a rustle of approval throughout the 
class, and all seemed to feel that light had been 
thrown on our problem. A bright young girl sit- 



294 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

ting near me whispered " Miss has what might 

be called a prehensile mind. She can twist her 
thought tighter around an idea and hold on longer 
to it than any one I ever knew." The little 
kindergartner with the New England conscience 
heaved a sigh of relief and said she could now ac- 
cept without scruple the theory of an imperative 
motor response to the defiance of life and move- 
ment, and, indeed, since the problem of spiritual 
evolution, as we had learned from the All-Gone 
Song, was to make by unmaking, she was begin- 
ning to discern in fatality the condition of freedom. 
The conversation now became general, and I 
can not remember who suggested the different 
points. Many experiences with children were re- 
lated, and memories of childhood were recalled. 
Several mothers had taken their little children to the 
country, shown them fishes swimming in a brook, 
and verified all Froebel says of their desire to catch 
the lively creatures, and their dismay when the 
motionless fish lies gasping on the grass.* One 

* " Brother, catch me one of the fishes swimming so mer- 
rily in tlie brook. Look at this little one — now it is here, now 
it is there. Sometimes it is straight, sometimes it is bent; it 
is so pretty whatever it does. Oh, if I could only swim and 
glide and dip ! If I csuld wriggle and slip, how I would tease 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 295 

motlier told of the delight of her four-year-old boy 
when he discovered that by making a scoop of his 
hands and dipping them in the stream he could 
bring up water and minnows together, and thus 
hold the living, twisting, wriggling creatures. 
Many kindergartners had tried to break up the 
habit of snatching at different objects by getting 
the children to notice and name things they could 
catch with their eyes and ears. Several related 
simple stories illustrating the idea of spiritual pos- 
session. All agreed that by imitating the activity 
of fish and bird the child satisfied the impulse which 
prompted their seizure. 

An attempt was made to connect the motto, 
song, and commentary of the Fish in the Brook 
with its predecessors. Omitting the Falling Song, 
which was recognized as the unsolicited effort of 
mother love to call forth responding trust and affec- 

you, brother, if you tried to catch me ! Please, brother, catch 
me a fish." 

" Here is a fish for yoi;, little sister, but hold it tight or it 
will slip away." 

"But, brother, it doesn't move any more; it only lies 
stretched out straight. But it is alive, for it gasps. I will 
lay it on the grass ; then it will begin moving again. Oh, it 
does not move even in the grass ; it lies quite straight and 
still. Why won't it move ? " See Mottoes and Commentaries 
of Froebel's Mother-Play, I. E. S., vol. xxxi, p. 117. 



296 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

tion, it was said that all the songs thus far consid- 
ered had shown advancing degrees of self-activity 
in the child and increasing recognition of self- 
activity in his environment. The Play with the 
Limbs had claimed the child's own motor activity as 
the point of departure for his development. The 
Weather Vane had shown him interpreting move- 
ment not his own by a process of unconscious intro- 
spection. The All-Gone commentary had indi- 
cated the transition from a blind response to ex- 
> ternal seduction to the impulsion of conscious ideals. 
The Tick-Tack had found in the allurement of the 
clock the point of departure for a rhythmic or cir- 
cular activity. The Taste Song had noted the 
dawning consciousness that qualities are the deposit 
of activities. The Flower Song and commentary 
had interpreted the child's faith in the flower fairy 
as a presentiment of the truth that wherever there 
is self -activity there is a self or soul. The songs of 
Beckoning the Chickens and Pigeons had signalized 
the discovery of life or the ascent of the child's con- 
sciousness beyond the stage of mere animism. The 
Fish in the Brook declared the craving of life for 
life. Always the living soul panted for more and 
fuller life, and it was because of their abounding 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 297 

vitality and incessant movement tliat fishes and 
birds appealed so irresistibly to the child's imagina- 
tion. There was perfect unanimity v^ith regard to 
this connection between the several songs, but some 
one said it had always been a puzzle to her why 
Froebel had preferred the fish to the bird as an 
illustration of the magnetic charm of free life and 
movement. The fish was pent in the brook. The 
bird had the freedom of all space. Fairy heroes 
possessed flying horses, flying saddles, flying boots, 
or flying ships. Was there any physical freedom 
like the freedom of wings? Was not the flight of 
the bird always the favorite poetic symbol of the 
flight of the spirit? 

"Wings that flutter in sunny air, 
Wings that dive and dip and dare, 
Wings of the humming bird flashing by. 
Wings of the lark in the purple sky. 
Wings of the eagle aloft, aloof, 
Wings of the pigeon upon the roof. 
Wings of the storm bird swift and free 
With wild winds sweeping across the sea — 
Often and often a voice in me sings, 
, Oh, for the freedom, the freedom of wings!"* 

One of our brightest neophytes thought she 
could answer this question. She had been reading 
* From The Child Garden. 



298 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

Froebel's life, and believed tliat the seed tl^ouglit of 
the Eish in the Brook had germinated in his mind at 
the time he became a teacher. He had been a for- 
ester, clerk in a revenue office, twice private secre- 
tary to wealthy agriculturists, and, dissatisfied with 
all these vocations, had finally decided to become an 
architect. Then the destiny that shapes our ends led 
him to Frankfurt, and brought him in contact with 
Gruner and his school. Gruner, a man of keen dis- 
cernment, soon became convinced that Froebel was 
a born educator, and offered him a position as 
teacher. Long reflection is never necessary when 
native impulse throws its whole w^eight upon one 
side of a question, and on the very day after 
Gruner's proposition was made Froebel found him- 
self standing among his scholars, and feeling, as in 
his astonishment he wrote to his brother, " like a 
fish in water, like a bird in the air." He had found 
his element. " If," continued the speaker, " we 
interpret our play in the light of this personal ex- 
perience, we can understand Froebel's preference 
for the fish. The element in which the fish moves 
can be seen; the element in which the bird moves 
is invisible. Child and bird live in the same ele- 
ment, whereas the fish requires a different element. 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 299 

The bird can still live tliougli cauglit and caged, 
but the fish dies when taken out of the water, and is 
therefore a better illustration of the dependence of 
free activity upon its ideal environment, and a 
more emphatic warning against that direct seizure 
which defeats its own aim. Finally, as Froebel's 
motto makes very clear, the crystal stream suggests 
the spiritual purity which is the condition of all 
joyous spiritual activity. ' Where active life is 
found, thither turns the child's eye. When such 
active life is in a clear, transparent element the 
child's heart swells with waves of joy.' " * 

At this moment some one who happened to 
glance at her slip of questions exclaimed, " I had 
forgotten all about our questions, but three of them 
are answered." A lively member declared that by 
change of emphasis we had managed to spend an 
hour over four words. She would review and sum 
up our discussion. 

" Wliy seize the fish? " 

" Why seize the fish? " 

"Why seize the fish? '' 

Attention was thus consciously directed to the 
fourth question, and a generalizing activity seized 

* Mottoes and Commentaries, p. 295. 
21 



300 LETTERS TO A MOTHER, 

upon the collective mind of the class. Generalizer 
number one thought that we did not sufficiently 
consider the relationship of individuality to its do- 
mestic, economic, and social environment. She had 
been reading Wilhelm Meister, and had found in 
it a wonderful study of different typical individuals 
and of the necessity laid upon each to find his own 
domestic and social affinities and his specific voca- 
tion. Wilhelm, hating the merchant class into 
which he was born, thought himself intended for 
an artist, but at last discovered his true vocation in 
surgery. He imagined himself successively in love 
with the affectionate but misguided Philina, the 
romantic countess, the practical and efficient 
Theresa, until at last his heart discovered its true 
ideal in the noble ISTatalia. Finally, he ascended 
from the commercial class, through the artistic class, 
into the nobility, acquiring gradually the free per- 
sonality and graceful bearing of the aristocrat. To 
his old merchant friend Werner he seemed after 
long separation to have grown taller, stronger, 
straighter, and in surprise the latter cried : " Thou 
hast spent thy time badly and I suppose gained 
nothing, but it must be owned thou art grown a 
piece of manhood which can not fail to turn to 



A PROPHECY OP FREEDOM. 301 

somewliat." Wilhelm's history was that of an in- 
dividuality disclosed to itself through the discovery 
of its ideal environment. This process of finding 
the self through finding the world in which it could 
live and act without constraint was shown not only 
in the career of the hero, but in the lives of many of 
the subordinate characters, each of whom Goethe 
conducted to his elect mate and his elect vocation. 
Even Philina had one useful talent: she could 
cut out wonderfully well-fitting garments. Fool- 
ish Lydia was a dextrous needlewoman; the mad- 
cap Friedrich had a rare memory, and was a born 
reporter. Hence these seemingly worthless indi- 
viduals became useful members of the industrial 
and educational society whose foundation was the 
work of the master spirits of the book. Under the 
control of this society, finally, was a pedagogic 
province in which children were reared in accord- 
ance with their differing individualities, so that they 
might the sooner learn to know themselves and the 
vocation to which l^ature had predestined them. 

The buzz and hum which followed this sum- 
mary of Goethe's great educational romance sank 
into silence as the widowed mother of a large and 
happy family rose to speak. We had all begged her 



302 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

to join our society, because we knew what treasures 
of wisdom must be laid up in the storehouse of 
her rich experience. She had drawn a different 
lesson from the crystal stream and the pure air. 
Instead of emphasizing the special element neces- 
sary for each individual, she had thought of the 
need of all individuals to live in a clear and in- 
vigorating spiritual atmosphere. She had with her 
Froebel's Education of Man, from which she read 
the following passage : " It is highly important for 
man that in the period of infancy he absorb nothing 
morbid, low, mean; nothing ambiguous, nothing 
bad. The looks, the countenances, of attendants 
should therefore be pure; indeed, every phase of 
the surroundings should be firm and sure, arousing 
and stimulating confidence, pure and clear; pure 
air, clear light, a clean room, however needy it 
may be in other respects. For, alas, often the 
whole life of man is not sufficient to efface what he 
has absorbed in childhood, the impressions of early 
youth, simply because his whole being, like a large 
eye, as it were, was opened to them and wholly 
given up to them. Often the hardest struggles of 
man with himself, and even the later most adverse 
and oppressive events in his life, have their origin 



A PROPHECY OP FREEDOM. 303 

in this stage of development; for this reason the care 
of the infant is so imi^ortant." * " The conscious 
effort of my life," continued our kind and helpful 
friend, " has been to create for my children what 
the French call a milieu, the English and Ameri- 
cans an atmospliere, and the Germans a Stimmung. 
The German word is best because it clearly accen- 
tuates an internal as opposed to an external en- 
vironment. I had an early premonition of the 
truths to which Professor Baldwin has recently 
called attention, and though I could not have put 
my feeling into words I realized that the ' child's 
soul reflects the whole system of influences which 
combine to stir its sensibilities; that in so far as his 
sensibilities are stirred he imitates, that by imitat- 
ing he forms habits, and that habits are character.' f 
I have, therefore, never allowed my children to 
have a coarse or even an ignorant nurse. I have 
not kept them away from other children, because 
I was sure that isolation would exaggerate indi- 
vidual and family idiosyncrasies. I have preferred 
kindergartens and schools to governesses and tutors, 

* Education of Man, Hailmann's Translation, p. 24. 
+ See Mental Development in the Child and the Race, 
James Mark Baldwin, p. 358. 



304 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

and I have checked all exclusive friendships be- 
cause aside from other dangers they are confining 
and give no room for growth. I talk much with 
my children and keep a shaping hold on their ideals 
by throwing in their way invigorating literature, 
and I try to make amends for my own shortcomings 
by drawing to our home friends of differing tastes, 
sympathies, and interests. We have artistic friends, 
literary friends, musical, scientific, and philosophic 
friends, and their influence upon my boys and girls 
has proved how much better it is to inspire than to 
exhort. But far above all other aid and succor I 
count the beneficent presence in our home of a 
saintly grandmother, the influence of a happy 
church life, and the guidance of a rarely wise 
pastor. For all ideals have their root in the re- 
ligious ideal, and if this be not firmly planted in 
the soil of the heart, I see not how we can expect the 
fruitage of a useful and happy life. So my prayer, 
like Froebel's, is ' that it may be given me to edu- 
cate men and women who shall stand with their 
feet on God's earth while their minds penetrate 
God's heaven, who shall be rooted like the tree 
in the one, that like the tree they may aspire 
toward the other; whose hearts shall unite earth 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 305 

and lieaven, being fed hj the rich and varied 
life of the world, and filled with the blessed peace 
of God.' " 

My letter threatens to be of formidable length, 
so I must omit the conversation which followed 
these remarks, and hasten to epitomize the sug- 
gestions of the next speaker. Reverting to the 
child's attempt to catch the fish and the bird, she 
asked if throughout life we were not like him, con- 
founding physical with spiritual possession. How 
we longed to own some favorite book; how often 
after we had made it ours we forgot to reread it! 
How many a bride lost in her busy husband the 
happy interchange of thought and feeling she had 
had with her betrothed ! How many parents, satis- 
fied with their children's caresses, failed to win their 
confidence! How many souls stilled with creeds 
and ritual the aspiration for union with a living 
God ! Should we think it very far-fetched if she con- 
fessed that some great historic movements seemed 
to her explained by this same confusion of spiritual 
with physical possession? Men had needed the 
Crusades to teach them that it was folly to seek 
the living Christ in a sepulchre. Christendom 
found no satisfaction in conquering the Holy Land 



306 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

and literally walking in tlie footsteps of the Saviour. 
Its inner craving was not appeased by shiploads of 
holy earth brought from Palestine to Europe. The 
living soul needed a living Christ, and the heart 
hunger which inspired the Crusades was satisfied in 
the Reformation.* 

It was growing late, and I was beginning to 
feel I must close the conference when at last up rose 
our sweet saint, one clear as the sun, fair as the 
moon, and who in face of what is untrue and ig- 
noble can be terrible as an army with banners. No 
saint of fiction is she, with an unconquered and 
unreal perfection, but one of the true saints, like 
Moses, whose meekness was a throttled anger; like 
Job, whose sublime faith was a slain and trampled 
doubt; like the whole host of ransomed spirits, who 
in the holy city receive the reward of them that 
overcome. I knew that she would be silent so long 
as there were any willing to speak, for uj)on her 
lowly mind has never dawned the thought that she 
can be as helpful as others. Yet which one of all 
the members of our society does not realize that no 

* See Hegel's Philosophy of History, English Translation, 
pp. 405, 410, 431, 433. See also Mother-Play Songs, a Com- 
mentary by Denton J. Snider. 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 307 

meeting is truly consecrate until our sweet saint 
speaks the hallowing word. She had written what 
she wished to say, for she is shy withal and can not 
depend on readiness of speech. I borrowed her 
paper at the end of the meeting, and copy it now 
for you. 

" The last four questions given to guide our 
study have been very helpful to me, and I am won- 
dering if I can put into words the thoughts they 
have stirred. The clew to their meaning is Froe- 
bel's suggestion that while the magnet which at- 
tracts the child to bird and fish is free activity in a 
pure element, the yearning which this attraction 
implies can be satisfied only as the soul itself 
achieves perfect self -activity. But perfect self- 
activity implies self-environment, for so long as 
thought or will depend upon an environment differ- 
ent from themselves for their incitement they are 
neither self-originated nor self-sustained. We are 
not free in sense-perception, for the activities of 
touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight are dependent 
upon presented objects. We are not free when we 
recall past perceptions, for we can only recall what 
has been presented, and thus, while delivered from 
a spatial, are enthralled by a temporal environment. 



308 LETTERS TO A MOTHER. 

But we are free wlien we think of causal energies, 
because we are then translating into consciousness 
our own causal power. Furthermore, since all men 
are causative beings, all individuals can compre- 
hend causal processes, and therefore through causal 
explanation we achieve intellectual community. 

" As thought is not free in sense-perception, so 
will is not free when prompted to action either by 
environment or by that blind impulse wherein 
mind is external to itself. Will begins to be free 
when by thinking a possible state of things in place 
of one that actually exists it originates conscious 
motives. Testing its self-originated motives by 
action, it learns to discriminate those which con- 
tradict from those which coincide with its own ideal 
nature, and in obedience to the latter achieves abso- 
lute self -activity or perfect liberty. 

" Thus far I had journeyed in my search for a 
self-originating and hence self-environing activity, 
when an illuminating flash of thought revealed to 
me the true meaning of Kant's moral imperative: 
' So act that thy deed will not contradict itself if 
made the universal act of all intelligent beings.' 
As men achieved intellectual solidarity through 
thinking causal energies, so they achieved moral 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 309 

solidarity tlirougli obeying altruistic ideals. Here 
indeed was thonglit environed by tbought, will en- 
vironed by will. And self-environing or universal 
thought and will, what could they be other than 
the thought and will of God! 

" Lost in meditation, I had forgotten all about 
our song and play when, as the identity of the ideal 
human with the divine defined itself in my con- 
sciousness, my thought suddenly reverted to its 
point of departure. I remembered the fish in the 
water, the bird in the air, and as I connected the 
joyful activity of each with its appropriate element 
the mists still clinging to my mental horizon rolled 
away, and there dawned upon me the sunrise of a 
new heaven and a new earth. Was the final truth 
not a God immanent in the world, but rather a 
world immanent in God? Were we living in God 
as the fish lives in the water and the bird in the air? 
Was the divine life the element in which alone our 
souls could exercise a free activity, and yet, since 
we were in the image of God, were we self -environ- 
ing because God environed? Was all spiritual life 
interpenetrating and interpenetrable, and was each 
spirit therefore not limited, but extended by the 
boundary of other spirits? I remembered that the 



310 LETTEES TO A MOTHER. 

physical universe was spread out in infinite or self- 
limiting sj)ace, and that through this including yet 
isolating environment each object received the 
guarantee of individuality. "Were all spirits thus 
included in God, who through this very inclusion 
assured ' the eternal form which shall still divide 
the eternal soul from all beside ' ? And, last of 
all, might it be because all souls were at home in 
God that searching for him we wandered from him? 

" ' Oh, where is the sea ? ' the fishes cried 

As they swam the crystal clearness through ; 

' We've heard from of old of the ocean's tide 
And we long to look on the waters blue. 

The wise ones speak of an infinite sea ; 

Oh, who can tell us if such there be ? ' 

"The lark flew up in the morning bright 

And sang and balanced on sunny wings, 

And this was its song: ' I see the light; 

I look on a world of beautiful things ; 

And flying and singing everywhere 

In vain I have sought to find the air.' " 

Do you wonder that I was happy as I 
walked home under the starlit sky? Those with 
whom I had held communion were all my friends, 
some of them dear pupils and children of my soul. 
They were trying to lea7'n all they could, he all 
they could, do all they could. I was sure that each 



A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM. 311 

truth intellectually discerned would be wrouglit 
into character, and I knew that in the home and in 
the kindergarten they would live with and for the 
children. In them the eager craving for self-cul- 
ture was mated with the consecrated impulse of 
child nurture. I had seen of the travail of my soul, 
and was satisfied. 



THE END. 



D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 

•WORKS BY ARABELLA B. BUCKLEY (MRS. FISHER). 

'T^HE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. With 74 

-* Illustrations. i2nio. Cloth, gilt, $1.50. 
" Deserves to take a permanent place in the literature of youth." — London Times. 
" So interesting that, having once opened the book, we do not know how to leavo 
off reading. " — Saturday Kevicui. 

qrHROUGH MAGIC GLASSES, and other Lectures. 
-* A Sequel to " The Fairy-Land of Science." Illustrated 
i2mo. Cloth, $1.50. 

CONTENTS. 
The Magician's Chamber by Moon'iighi. A n Hour ivitk the Sun. 
Magic Glasses and How to Use Them. A n Evening with the Stars. 
Fairy Rings and How They are Made. Little Beings from a Miniature Ocean. 
The Life-History cf Lichens and Mosses. The Dartmoor Ponies. 
Tlie History of a Lava-Stream. 1 he Magician's Dream of Ancient Days. 

T IFE AND HER CHILDREN : Glimpses of Am- 

• ' -^ 7nal Life from the Amccba to the Insects. With over loo Illus- 
trations. i2mo. Cloth, gilt, $1.50. 
" The work forms a charming introduction to the study of zoology — the scie.ice of 
living things — which, we trust, will find its way into many hands." — Natiiie. 

JjyiNNERS IN LIFE'S RACE; or, I he Greai 

y r Backboned Family. With numerous Illustrations. i2mo. 
Cloth, gilt, $1.50. 

" We can conceive of no better gift-book than this volume. Miss Buckley has spared 
no pains to incorporate in her book the latest results of scientific research. The illus- 
trations in the book deserve the highest praise — they are numerous, accurate, and 
strikmg." — Spectator. 

SHORT HISTORY OF NATURAL SCI- 
ENCE ; and of the Progress of Discover)' from the Time of 
the Greeks to the Present Time. New edition, revised and re- 
arranged. With 77 Illustrations, i2mo. Cloth, $2.00. 

" The work, though mainly intended for children and young persons, may be most 
advantageously read by many persons of riper age, and may serve to implant in their 
minds a fuller and clearer conception of ' the promises, the achievements, and the claims 
of science.' " — 'fournal of Science. 

ORAL TEACHINGS OF SCIENCE. i2mo. 

Cloth, 75 cents. 

" A little book that proves, with excellent clearness and force, how many and strik- 
ing are the moral lessons suggested by the study of the life history of the plant or bird, 
beast or insect." — London Saturday Revieiv. 



A 



M. 



New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 32 Fifth Avenue. 



D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 

MODERN SCIENCE SERIES. 

Edited by Sir John Lubbock, Bart., F. R. S. 

^HE CA USE OF AN ICE AGE. By Sir Robert 
■^ Ball, LL. D., F. R. S., Royal Astronomer of Ireland ; author 
of " Siar Land," " The Story of the Sun," etc. 
" Sir Robert Ball's bjuk is, as a matter of course, admirably written. Though but a 
small one, it if a most impui'taiit contribution to geology." — London Saturday Review. 
" A fascinating subject, cleverly related and almost colloquially discussed." — Phila- 
delphia Public Ledger'. 

'HE HORSE: A Study in Natural History. By 

William U. Flower, C. B., Director in the British Natural 

History Mus-^um. With 27 Illustrations. 

"The author admits that there are 3,800 separate treatises on the horse already pub- 
lished, but he thi.iks vKi: he can add something to the amount of useful information 
now before the public, and that something not heretofore written will be found in this 
book. 'I'he volume gives a large amount of information, both scientific and practical, 
on the noble animal of wh'ch it treats." — Ne-w i'ork Cofnmerciai Advertiser. 

HTHE OAK: A Study in Botany. By H. Marshall 

-» Ward, F. R. S. With 53 Illustrations. 

"From the acorn to the timber which has figured so gloriously in English ships 
and houses, tl)e tree is fully described, and all its living and preserved beauties and 
virtues, in nature and in cjn truction, are recounted and pictured." — Bioohlyn hagle. 

^ TH NO LOGY IN FOLKLORE. By George L. 



T 



E 



GoMME, F. S. A., President of the Folklore Society, etc. 

"The author puts forward no extnvagant assumptions, and the method he points 
out for the comparative study of folklore seems to promise a considerable extension of 
knowledge as to prehistoric times " — Independent. 

Y^HE LAWS AND PROPERTIES OF MAT- 

-* TER. By R. T. Glazebrook, F. R, S., Fellow of Trinity 

College, Cambridge. 

" It is astonishing how interesting such a book can be made when the author has a 

perfect mastery of his subject, as Mr. Glazebrook has. One knows nothing of the 

world in which he lives until he has obtained some insight of the properties of matter 

as explained in this excellent work." — Chicago Herald. 

'^nHE FA UNA OF THE DEEP SEA. By Sydney 

-* J. HiCKSON, M. A., Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge 

With 23 Illustrations. 

" That realm of mystery and wondf rs at the bottom of the great waters is gradually 

being mapped and explored and studied until its secrets seem no longer secrets. . . . 

This excellent book has a score of illustrations and a careful index to add to its value, 

and in every way is to be commended for its interest and its scientific meiit." — Chiaag, 

Times. 

Each, i2Fno, cloth, $1.00. 



New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue. 



